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Title: The Seven Lively Arts
Author: Seldes, Gilbert
Language: English
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[Illustration:
The 7 Lively
Arts
_by_
Gilbert Seldes
]
[Illustration: THE CUSTODIANS OF THE KEYSTONE. By Ralph Barton]
THE SEVEN
LIVELY ARTS
By
_Gilbert Seldes_
“... _But, beside those great men, there is a certain number
of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we
cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in
general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who
have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just
because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority._”
--WALTER PATER
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXIV
THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS
Copyright, 1924
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
_First Edition_
B-Y
TO MY FATHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
_The Keystone the Builders Rejected_ 3
_An Imaginary Conversation_ 27
_“I Am Here To-Day”: Charlie Chaplin_ 41
_Say It with Music_ 57
_Tearing a Passion to Ragtime_ 69
_Toujours Jazz_ 83
_Mr Dooley, Meet Mr Lardner_ 111
_A Tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld_ 129
_The Darktown Strutters on Broadway_ 149
_Plan for a Lyric Theatre in America_ 161
_The One-Man Show_ 177
_The Dæmonic in the American Theatre_ 191
_These, Too_ 203
_The “Vulgar” Comic Strip_ 213
_The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself_ 231
_The Damned Effrontery of the Two-a-Day_ 249
_They Call It Dancing_ 267
_St Simeon Stylites_ 277
_Burlesque, Circus, Clowns, and Acrobats_ 291
_The True and Inimitable Kings of Laughter_ 297
_The Great God Bogus_ 309
_An Open Letter to the Movie Magnates_ 323
_Before a Picture by Picasso_ 345
APPENDICES
_Appendix to “I Am Here To-Day”_ 361
_“Bananas” and Other Songs_ 367
_Appendix to “These, Too_...” 374
_The Krazy Kat Ballet_ 377
_Further Note on the Fratellini_ 380
_The Cinema Novel_ 383
_Acknowledgments_ 391
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Custodians of the Keystone. _By Ralph Barton_ _Frontispiece_
_Page_
Charlie Chaplin. _By E. E. Cummings_ 42
Irving Berlin (_Photo. Maurice Goldberg_) 74
George Gershwin (_Photo. Carl Klein_) 92
The Sun’s Dwelling. _By Joseph Urban_ 132
(_From the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915. Photo. M. N. Lawrence_)
George M. Cohan. _By Alfred Frueh_ 138
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Willie Collier. By Alfred Frueh 142
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Eddie Cantor. _By Roland Young_ 179
Frank Tinney. _By Roland Young_ 181
Ed Wynn. _By Roland Young_ 183
Fanny Brice (_Photo. Steichen_) 192
Al Jolson (_Photo. Muray_) 198
Leon Errol. _By Alfred Frueh_ 204
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
Bert Savoy (_Photo. Abbe_) 208
Mike and Mike. _By T. E. Powers_ 218
(_Copyright by the Star Company. By permission of the
publishers of the_ New York Journal)
A Cartoon. _By R. L. Goldberg_ 228
(_Courtesy of_ Life--_from the Burlesque Sunday Supplement
Number_)
Fragment from the Krazy Kat of the Door. _By George Herriman_ 240
(_Copyright by the Star Company_)
Krazy Kat. _By George Herriman_ 244
(_Courtesy of the artist and the_ New York American)
Vaudeville. _By Charles Demuth_ 254
Joe Cook (_Photo. Morton Harvey_) 260
Irene Castle (_Photo. Muray_) 268
Cirque Medrano. _By Henri Toulouse-Lautrec_ 292
(_By permission of Paul Rosenberg & Co., Inc._)
National Winter Garden Burlesque. _By E. E. Cummings_
(_Courtesy of_ The Dial) 294
Paolo 298
Francesco 298
Alberto 299
The Fratellini. _By Fernand Leger_ 300
A Painting. _By Pablo Picasso_ 346
(_By permission of Paul Rosenberg & Co., Inc._)
NOTE
This book was written while on holiday some three thousand miles away
from data, documents, and means of verification. It is written from
memory and, although I have had time and have tried to check up, I feel
sure that the safest thing is to let it go as cautious merchants do
when they send out statements--with the _caveat_: E. and O. E.--errors
and omissions excepted. I haven’t tried to write a history of any of
the lively arts, nor intended to mention all of those who practice
them. I should, however, feel sorry if I have omitted anyone who has
given me intense pleasure, even though the omission has not, in any
way, the countenance of a slur.
Everything else that properly belongs in a preface has found its way
into the two chapters: _The Great God Bogus_ and _Before a Picture by
Picasso_--and the acknowledgments are numerous and serious enough to
need a place for themselves in the appendix.
G. S.
_Ile St Louis--New York City
March 1923--February 1924_
_The Keystone
the Builders Rejected_
THE KEYSTONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED
_For fifteen years there has existed in the United States, and
in the United States alone, a form of entertainment which,
seemingly without sources in the past, restored to us a kind
of laughter almost unheard in modern times. It came into being
by accident; it had no pretensions to art. For ten years or
more it added an element of cheerful madness to the lives of
millions and was despised and rejected by people of culture
and intelligence. Suddenly--suddenly as it appeared to them--a
great genius arose and the people of culture conceded that in
his case, but in his case alone, art existed in slap-stick
comedy; they did not remove their non expedit from the form
itself._
_Perhaps only those of us who care for the rest know how
good Charlie is. Perhaps only the inexpressive multitudes
who have laughed and not wondered why they laughed can know
how fine slap-stick is. For myself, I have had no greater
entertainment than these dear and preposterous comedies, and
all I can do is remember. The long, dark, narrow passage set
out with uncomfortable chairs; the sharp almond odours, the
sense of uncertainty, and the questionable piano; and then upon
the screen, in a drab grey and white, jiggling insecurely,
something strange and wonderful occurred. It was mingled with
dull and stupid things; but it had a fire, a driving energy
of its own--and it was funny! Against all our inhibitions
and habits it played games with men and women; it made them
ridiculous and mad; it seemed to have no connexion with the
logic of human events, trusting to an undecipherable logic of
its own. A few scholars found the commedia dell’arte living
again; a few artists saw that the galvanic gestures and
movements were creating fresh lines and interesting angles.
And a nation cared for them intensely until the remorseless
hostility of the genteel began to corrupt the purity of
slap-stick. That is where we are now: too early to write an
epitaph--late enough to pay a tribute._
Lest the year 1914 should be not otherwise distinguished in history,
it may be recorded that it was then, or a year earlier, or possibly a
year later, that the turning point came in the history of the American
moving picture. The first of the great mergers arrived--an event not
unforeseen in itself, a “logical development” the press agents called
it--seeming to establish the picture as a definitely accepted form of
entertainment. It was a moment when a good critic might have foretold
the course of the moving picture during the next decade, for at that
time the Triangle of Fine Arts (D. W. Griffith), Kay-Bee (Thomas H.
Ince), and Keystone (Mack Sennett) was formed. Two of these names were
already known, and of the two one was to become, for a time, the
most notable name in the profession; the third was hidden behind the
obscure symbol of the Keystone; it represented one who had acted in,
and was now directing, the most despised, and by all odds the most
interesting, films produced in America. Mr Griffith was already entered
on that road which has since ruined him as a director; he was producing
_Intolerance_, and, if I may borrow a phrase from the Shuberts, his
personal supervision was not always given to the Triangle-Fine Arts
releases; Mr Ince was presently to meditate upon the possibility of
joining the word “super” to the word “spectacle,” thus creating the
word “superspectacle”; and Mr Sennett--by a process of exclusion one
always arrives at Mr Sennett. He is the Keystone the builders rejected.
I know nothing more doleful as a subject of conversation than the
social-economics of the moving picture; what was remarkable about the
Triangle was not its new method of distribution, its new hold on the
timid exhibitor, or its capacity for making or losing fortunes. The
thing to note is that the two “serious” producers, and the hard-headed
business men who invested money in their efforts, thought it well
to associate with themselves the best producer of vulgar slap-stick
comedy. More than that, they combined in a peculiar ratio for the
scheme provided that there was to be released each week either a Fine
Arts or an Ince picture; and that with each of these was to be shown
a Keystone comedy. So that those who were perpetually being caught in
the rain, or missing the eleven-o’clock from Philadelphia to New York,
saw twice as many Keystone comedies as (a) Fine Arts or (b) Kay-Bee
releases. The recent all-hailing of Mr Chaplin as an artist because of
his work in _The Kid_, the bright young reputations of Harold Lloyd
and Buster Keaton, indicate that most critics of the moving picture
caught the train and missed the shower. They certainly missed the
comedies; for the Fine Arts and Ince pictures were in their time the
best pictures produced; and the Keystone comedies were consistently and
almost without exception better.
This is not the place to discuss the shortcomings of the feature film;
for the moment, let the dreadful opulent gentility of a Cecil De Mille
production serve only to sharpen the saucy gaiety of the comic, the
dulness of a Universal set off the revelry of slap-stick. There is one
serious point which a good critic (Aristotle, for example) would have
discovered when he regarded the screen as long ago as 1914 and became
aware of the superiority of the comic films. He would have seen at once
that while Mr Griffith and Mr Ince were both developing the technique
of the moving picture, they were exploiting their discoveries with
materials equally or better suited to another medium: the stage or the
dime novel or whatever. Whereas Mr Sennett was already so enamoured of
his craft that he was doing with the instruments of the moving picture
precisely those things which were best suited to it--those things which
could not be done with any instrument but the camera, and could appear
nowhere if not on the screen.
This does not mean that nothing but slap-stick comedy is proper
to the cinema; it means only that everything in slap-stick _is_
cinematographic; and since perceiving a delicate adjustment of means
to end, or a proper relation between method and material, is a source
of pleasure, Mr Sennett’s developments were more capable of pleasing
the judicious than those of either of his two fellow-workers. The
highly logical humanist critic of the films could have foreseen in
1914--without the decade of trial and error which has intervened--what
we see now: that the one field in which the picture would most notably
declare itself a failure would be that of the drama (Elinor Glyn-Cecil
De Mille-Gilbert Parker, in short). Without a moment’s hesitation he
would have put his finger on those two elements in the cinema which,
being theoretically sound, had a chance of practical success: the
spectacle (including the spectacular melodrama) and the grotesque
comedy. Several years later he would have added one word more, that
grotesque tragedy might conceivably succeed. For it is not only the
fun in the Keystones which makes them successful: it is the method of
presentation.
The rightness of the spectacle film is implicit in its name: the
screen is a place on which things can be _seen_, and so long as a film
depends upon the eye it is right for the screen--and whether it is
right in any other regard depends upon taste and judgment and skill.
Omit as irrelevant the news reels, animated cartoons, educational and
travel films--all of them good; omit equally those printed jokes and
clippings from the _Literary Digest_ which are at once the greatest
trial _and_ error of the screen. What remains? The feature film and
_The Cabinet of Dr Caligari_. This--the only film of high fantasy I
have ever seen--is the seeming exception which proves the rule, since
it owes its success to the skilfully concealed exploitation of the
materials and technique of the spectacle and of the comic film, and not
to the dramatic quality of its story. The studio settings in distortion
represent the spectacle; they are variations of scenery or “location”;
the chase over the roofs is a psychological parallel to the Keystone
cops; and the weak moment of this superb picture is that in which the
moving picture always fails, in the double revelation at the end, like
that of _Seven Keys to Baldpate_, representing “drama.”
No. The drama film is almost always wrong, the slap-stick almost
always right; and it is divinely just that the one great figure of
the screen should have risen out of the Keystone studios. He came
too early; Chaplin spoiled nearly everything else for us, and he is
always used by those who dislike slap-stick to prove their case.
Their case, regrettably, is in a fair way to be proved, for slap-stick
is in danger. The hypothetical critic mentioned above has not yet
occurred; Mr Bushnell Dimond, the best actual critic of the movies,
is without sympathy for Mack Sennett and calls him a Bourbon, in the
sense of one who forgets nothing and learns less. What Mr Sennett has
needed long since is encouragement and criticism; and stupid newspaper
critics (who write half-columns about a new Gloria Swanson picture
and add “the comedy which ends the bill is _Down in the Sewer_”) have
left slap-stick wholly without direction.[1] At the same time the
tradition of gentility, the hope of being “refined,” has touched the
grotesque comedy; its directors have heard abuse and sly remarks about
custard pies so long that they have begun to believe in them, and the
madness which is a monstrous sanity in the movie comedy is likely to
die out. The moving picture is being prettified; the manufacturers
and exhibitors are growing more and more pretentious, and the riot
of slap-stick seems out of place in a “presentation” which begins
with the overture to _Tannhäuser_, and includes a baritone from the
imperial opera house in Warsaw singing _Indian Love Lyrics_ in front
of an art curtain. In Paris there are one or two Chaplin films visible
nearly every day; in New York the Rialto Theatre alone seems to make
a habit of Chaplin revivals and of putting its comic feature in the
electric sign. The Capitol, the largest, and rapidly becoming the most
genteel, of moving picture palaces (but who ever heard of an opera
palace?) frequently announces a programme of seven or eight items
without a comedy among them; and you have to go to squalid streets and
disreputable neighborhoods if you want to see Chaplin regularly. He
could ask for no finer tribute, to be sure; but it is not much to our
credit that the greatest mimic of our time has no theatre named after
him, that it was in Berlin, not in Chicago or New York, that the first
Chaplin festival took place, and that _Tillie’s Punctured Romance_,
a film intensely important in his development, was last billed in
a converted auction room on the lower East Side of New York, where
Broadway would find it vulgar.
There were always elements in the Keystone which jeopardized its
future--it lacked variety, it was often dull, its lapses of taste were
serious. (I transfer the name of Keystone to the _genre_ of which
it was the most notable example; it was for long, and may still be,
superior to most of the others.) But, while there is still time, its
miraculously good qualities can be caught and possibly preserved. The
ideal comedy of Mack Sennett is a fairly standardized article; too
much so, perhaps, but the elements are sound. They include a simple,
usually preposterous plot, frequently a burlesque of a serious play;
more important are the characters, grotesque in bulk, form, or make-up;
and, finally, the events which have as little connexion with the plot
as, say, a clog dance in a musical comedy. In the early days of the
Keystone, it is said, the plot was almost nonexistent in advance, and
developed out of the set and the props. The one which was called, in
revival, _The Pile Driver_, must have been such a film, for its plot
is that two men meet a pretty girl near a river and they find a huge
mallet. It is a film full of impromptus--not very brilliant ones,
as a matter of fact--in which Sennett and Chaplin and Mabel Normand
each occasionally give flashes of their qualities. A few years later
you see the same thing when the trick of working up a film from the
material in hand has become second nature. _His Night Out_ presents Ben
Turpin and Charlie Chaplin as equal comedians: two men on a drinking
party, stumbling into a luxurious hotel, reverting automatically to
the saloon from which they have been thrown, mutually assisting and
hindering each other in a serious effort to do something they cannot
define, but which they feel to be of cosmic importance. Later, one
finds a more sophisticated kind of comic. _Bright Eyes_ has to do
with a gawky young man, reputed rich, received into a wealthy family,
engaged to the daughter, denounced as an impostor, reduced to the
kitchen, flirting there with the maid, restored to favour, and, nobly
refusing the daughter’s hand, marrying the maid. Here Ben Turpin had
good moments, but much of the gaiety of the film depended upon Chester
Conklin (or one who much resembles him) as another servant in the
house, bundling himself up in furs like Peary in the Arctic, bidding
farewell at an imaginary outpost of civilization, and striding into--a
huge refrigerator, to bring back a ham before the adoring eyes of the
cook.
The comic film is by nature adventurous and romantic, and I think
what endears it to us is that the adventure is picaresque and the
romance wholly unsentimental--that is, both are pushed to the edge of
burlesque. For the romance you have a love affair, frequently running
parallel to a parody of itself. The hero is marked by peculiarities
of his own: the Chaplin feet, the Hank Mann bang and sombre eyes,
the Turpin squint, the Arbuckle bulk; against these oddities and
absurdities plays the serene, idle beauty of a simple girl (Edna
Purviance or Mabel Normand in her lovely early days), and only on
occasions a comic in her own right like Louise Fazenda or Polly Moran.
In some five hundred slap-stick comedies I do not remember one single
moment of sentimentality; and it seems to me that every look and
gesture of false chivalry and exaggerated devotion has been parodied
there. The characteristic moment, after all, is when the comedy is
ended, and just as the hero is about to kiss the heroine he winks
broadly and ironically at the spectators. Our whole tradition of love
is destroyed and outraged in these careless comedies; so also our
tradition of heroism. And since the moving picture, quite naturally,
began by importing the whole baggage of the romantic and sentimental
novel and theatre, the moving-picture comedy has at last arrived at
burlesquing its silly-serious half-sister. Two years before _Merton
of the Movies_ appeared, Mack Sennett, with the help of Ben Turpin’s
divinely crossed eyes, had consummated a burlesque of Messrs Griffith,
Ince, and Lubitsch, in _A Small Town Idol_, far more destructively,
be it said, than Chaplin in his _Carmen_, and with a vaster fun than
_Merton_.
Everything incongruous and inconsequent has its place in the unrolling
of the comic film: love and masquerade and treachery; coincidence and
disguise; heroism and knavishness; all are distorted, burlesqued,
exaggerated. And--here the camera enters--all are presented at an
impossible rate; the culmination is in the inevitable struggle and
the conventional pursuit, where trick photography enters and you see
the immortal Keystone cops in their flivver, mowing down hundreds of
telegraph poles without abating their speed, dashing through houses or
losing their wheels and continuing, blown to bits and reassembled in
midair; locomotives running wild, yet never destroying the cars they so
miraculously send spinning before them; airplanes and submarines in and
out of their elements--everything capable of motion set into motion;
and at the height of the revel, the true catastrophe, the solution of
the preposterous and forgotten drama, with the lovers united under the
canopy of smashed motor cars, or the gay feet of Mr Chaplin gently
twinkling down the irised street.
And all of this is done _with the camera, through action_ presented to
the eye. The secret of distortion is in the camera, and the secret of
pace in the projector. Regard them for a moment, regard the slap-stick
as every moment explains itself, and then go to the picture palace and
spend one-third of your time reading the flamboyancies of C. Gardner
Sullivan and another third watching the contortions of a famous actress
as she “registers” an emotion which action and photography should
present directly, and you will see why the comic film is superior.
There is virtually no registering in the comedy, there is no senseless
pantomime, and the titles are succinct and few. In _Bright Eyes_, as
the marriage of convenience is about to take place, the mother sweeps
in with these words, “Faint quick--he’s dead broke.” An absurd letter
or telegram is introduced to set the play going; the rest is literally
silence.
What I have said about Chaplin regards him as a typical slap-stick
comedian.[2] The form would have succeeded without him and he has
passed beyond the form entirely. The other practitioners of the art
come out of his shadow, and some of them are excellent. What makes
Chaplin great is that he has irony and pity, he knows that you must
not have the one without the other; he has both piety and wit. Next
to him, for his work in _His Bread and Butter_ and a few other films,
stands Hank Mann, who translates the childlike gravity of Chaplin into
a frightened innocence, a serious endeavour to understand the world
which seems always hostile to him. He was trained, I have been told,
as a tragic actor on the East Side of New York, and he seems always
stricken with the cruelty and madness of an existence in which he alone
is logical and sane. If he, walking backward to get a last glimpse of
his beloved (after “A Waiter’s Farewell,” as the caption has it), steps
on the running board of a motor instead of a street car, he is willing
to pay the usual fare and let bygones be bygones. His black bang almost
meets his eyes, and his eyes are mournful and piteous; his gesture
is slow and rounded; a few of the ends of the world have come upon
his head and the eyelids are a little weary. He is the Wandering Jew
misdirected into comic life by an unscrupulous fate.
His most notable opposite is Harold Lloyd, a man of no tenderness,
of no philosophy, the embodiment of American cheek and indefatigable
energy. His movements are all direct, straight; the shortest distance
between two points he will traverse impudently and persistently, even
if he is knocked down at the end of each trip; there is no poetry in
him, his whole utterance being epigrammatic, without overtone or image.
Yet once, at least, he too stepped into that lunatic Arcadia to which
his spirit is alien; not in _Grandma’s Boy_, which might just as well
have been done by Charles Ray, but in _A Sailor-made Man_. Here the
old frenzy fell upon him, the weakling won by guile, and instead of
fighting one man he laid out a mob from behind; something excessive,
topsy-turvy, riotous at last occurred in his ordered existence. He
is funny; but he has no vulgarity; he is smart. He amuses me without
making me laugh, and I figure him as a step toward gentility.
Ben Turpin has progressed, fortunately without taking that step. In
_Bright Eyes_ he was mildly absurd; in _His Night Out_, with Chaplin,
he was tremendously funny; and what he learned there of the lesson of
the master he imported into his private masterpiece, _A Small Town
Idol_. Like Chaplin, he disarms you and endears himself; unlike him,
and often to Turpin’s advantage, he knows how to be ridiculous. One
always sees Chaplin’s impersonations as they see themselves. Is he a
count or a pretender, or an English gentleman, or a policeman, or a
tramp, the character is completely embodied; Chaplin never makes fun of
himself. The process of identification is complete and, apart from the
interest and the fun of the action, your chief pleasure is in awaiting
the inevitable denunciation. Ben Turpin, who has only a talent for
Chaplin’s genius, makes the most of it and lets you see through him.
His exaggerations do more than reveal--they betray, and above all
they betray the fact that Turpin is aware of the absurdities of his
characters; you see them objectively, and through him you see through
them.
When he returns home as the Wild West screen hero, and his own picture
is shown before those who so recently had despised him, his deprecating
gesture before the screen on which his exploits are being shown is so
broad, so simple-silly, that it is more than a description of himself
as he thinks it is, and lets us perceive his absurdity. He is exactly a
zany.
Three other buffoons of the old Keystone days retain their capacity
to be amusing: the galvanic, jack-in-the-box, Al St John; Mack Swain,
and Chester Conklin; they are exactly as they were ten years ago, and
one fancies they will never be great. The difficult person to be sure
about is Buster Keaton, who came to the pictures from vaudeville,
and has carried into his new medium his greatest asset, an enormous,
incorruptible gravity. He never smiles, they say, and I have sat
through some of his pictures--_The Boat_, for one--without seeing any
reason why he should. It was a long mechanical contrivance with hardly
any humour, and was considered a masterpiece; while _The Paleface_,
in which Keaton played an entomologist captured by Indians, passed
unnoticed. It had nearly everything a comic needs, and there were
certain movements _en masse_, certain crossings of the lines of action,
which were quite perfect. Keaton’s intense preoccupation and his
hard sense of personality are excellent. In _Cops_ he took a purely
Keystone subject and multiplied and magnified it to its last degree
of development: thousands of policemen rushed down one street; equal
thousands rushed up another; and before them fled this small, serious
figure, bent on self-justification, caught in a series of absurd
accidents, wholly law-abiding, a little distracted. I do not think one
will soon forget the exquisite close of that picture: the whole police
force forming a phalanx, hurled as one body into the courtyard of the
station--and then the little figure which, having been trapped within,
seems doomed to arrest, coming out, itself accoutred in uniform, and
quietly, quietly locking the huge doors behind it. It, yes; for by that
time Keaton has become wholly impersonal. So affecting Larry Semon has
never been; nor Clyde Cook; and behind them, but _longo intervallo_,
come the misguided creatures who make the kind of slap-stick which most
people think Sennett makes. I am sure there are other good comedians;
but I am not trying to make a catalogue. No one, in any case, has been
able to impose himself as these few have; and most of the others are so
near in method and manner to these that they require nothing fresh to
be said of them.
It seemed for a moment, in 1922, that if a confessed murderer were set
free by a jury, he or she went into the movies; but if a moving-picture
actor was declared innocent, he was barred from the screen. The justice
of this I cannot discuss; yet a protest can be made against the
æsthetically high-minded who said that the real reason for barring the
films of “Fatty” Arbuckle was their vulgarity and their dulness. For
“Fatty” had gone over to a comedy more refined than slap-stick long
before 1922; and in 1914 he was neither stupid nor dull. Once indeed,
in _Fatty and Mabel Adrift_ (Mabel being Miss Normand) he came near to
the best of slap-stick, and the same picture was as photography and
printing, for sepia seascapes and light and shade, a superior thing
entirely. The fatuous, ingratiating smile was innocent then, in all
conscience, and as for vulgarity--
Let us, before we go to the heart of that question, look for a
moment at the comedy which was always set against the slap-stick to
condemn the custard-pie school of fun--the comedy of which the best
practitioners were indisputably Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew. In them there
was nothing offensive, except an enervating dulness. They pretended
to be pleasant episodes in our common life, the life of courtship and
marriage; they accepted all our conventions; and they were one and all
exactly the sort of thing which the junior class at high school acted
when money was needed to buy a new set of erasers for Miss Struther’s
course in mechanical drawing. The husband stayed out late at night or
was seen kissing a stenographer; the wife had trouble with a maid or
was extravagant at the best shops; occasionally arrived an ingenuity,
such as the romantic attachment of the wife to anniversaries contrasted
with her husband’s negligence--I seem to recall that to cure her he
brought her a gift one day in memory of Washington’s birthday. These
things were little stories, not even smoking-room stories; they were
acted entirely in the technique of the amateur stage; they were
incredibly genteel, in the milieu where “When Baby Came” is genteel;
neither in matter nor in manner did they employ what the camera and
the projector had to give. And, apart from the agreeable manners of Mr
and Mrs Sidney Drew, nothing made them successful except the corrupt
desire, on the part of the spectators, to be refined.
Nothing of the sort operated in the far better (feature film) comedies
which Douglas Fairbanks made when he was with Fine Arts. To suit
his physique, they were almost all adventurous; they were always
entertaining. _Flirting With Fate_[3] presented a young man who had
decided to die and gave “Automatic Joe,” a gunman, his last fifty
dollars to “bump him off” unexpectedly. Once the agreement was made,
the tide of fortune turned for the young man, and, desiring earnestly
to live, he felt the paid hand of the assassin always upon his
shoulder. At the same time the gunman had reformed; his one object was
to return the unearned fifty dollars. And the cross-purposes, the chase
and flight, were within short distance of high farce. The comedies of
Charles Ray were also unpretentious, and also used the camera. These
and others were always perfectly decent; but none of them was refined.
And there, essentially, we are back at slap-stick; for the refined
comedy was pretentious, and what is pretentious is vulgar in any
definition of the word; while slap-stick never pretended to be anything
but itself and could be disgusting or tasteless or dull, but it could
not be vulgar. I consider vulgar the thing which offends against the
canons of taste accepted by honest people, not by imitative people,
not by snobs. It is equally bad taste, presumably, to throw custard
pies and to commit adultery; but it is not bad taste to speak of
these things. What is intolerable only is the pretense, and it was
against pretentiousness that the slap-stick comedy had its hardest
fight. It showed a man sitting down on a lighted gas stove, and it
did not hesitate to disclose the underwear charred at the buttocks
which were the logical consequence of the action. There was never the
slightest suggestion of sexual indecency, or of moral turpitude, in the
Keystones; there was a fuller and freer use of gesture--gesture with
all parts of the human frame--than we are accustomed to. The laughter
they evoked was broad and long; it was thoracic, abdominal; it shook us
because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet. The animal
frankness and health of these pictures constituted the ground of their
offense. And something more.
For the Keystone offended our sense of security in dull and
business-like lives. Few of us imagined ourselves in the frenzy of
action which they set before us; none of us remained unmoved at
the freedom of fancy, the wildness of imagination, the roaring,
destructive, careless energy which it set loose. It was an ecstasy
of comic life, and in our unecstatic lives we fled from it to
polite comedy, telling ourselves that what we had seen was ugly and
displeasing. Often it was. I am stating the case for slap-stick, but
I do not wish to make myself responsible for the millions of feet of
stupidity and ugliness which have been released as comic films. I have
seen Ham and Bud and the imitators of Charlie Chaplin; I have seen
an egg splattered over a man’s face with such a degree of nauseous
ugliness that it seemed I could never see a comic again. But as like
as not, on the same bill was the James Young screen version of _The
Devil_ with George Arliss, or Geraldine Farrar in _Carmen_, or the
“_‘Affairs of’ Anatol_.” And when people who have seen these “artistic”
films, or the barber-shop scene in a Hitchcock revue or Eddie Cantor in
a dentist’s chair, exclaim (falsely) that moving-picture comedians do
nothing but throw pies, I am moved to wonder what on earth they are
expected to throw. They are using the eternal materials of their art,
precisely as Aristophanes used them and Rabelais, with already far too
many concessions to a debased and cowardly and artificial taste. At the
two extremes simple and sophisticated people have looked directly at
the slap-stick screen and loved it for itself alone; in between are the
people who can see nothing without the lorgnettes of prejudice provided
by fashion and gentility. The simple ones discovered and prospered
the slap-stick screen long before the sophisticated were aware of its
existence; they took it for what it was and cared nothing for the fact
that it was made by inartistic people and shown in reeking rooms for a
nickel. For long the poison of culture was powerless to enter; but not
long enough.
I feel moderately certain that the slap-stick comedy is a good thing
for America to have; yet, being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a
reformer, I have to put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds.
It has given me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see
it saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its
unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to banish the
bleak refinement which is setting in upon it.
Seven years ago, in an imaginary conversation, I made Mr David Wark
Griffith announce that he would produce _Helen of Troy_, and I made
him defend the Keystone comedy. It seemed to me then as now that there
is nothing incongruous in these subjects; properly made, they would
be equally unrefined, but _Helen of Troy_, being in the grand manner,
would be called “artistic.” Mr Griffith has not made _Helen of Troy_,
and the pre-eminent right to make it has passed from his hands. The
Keystone, with its variations, needs still an authoritative defender
and an authoritative critic. It is one of the few places where the
genteel tradition does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where
imagination is still riotous and healthy. In its economy and precision
are two qualities of artistic presentation; it uses still everything
commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it
has refrained from using the broad farces of literature--Aristophanes
and Rabelais and Molière--as material; it could become happily
sophisticated, without being cultured. But there is no fault inherent
in its nature, and its virtues are exceptional. For us to appreciate
slap-stick may require a revolution in our way of looking at the arts;
having taken thought on how we now look at the arts, I suggest that the
revolution is not entirely undesirable.
_An Imaginary
Conversation_
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
_The theatre of Dionysos. A great crowd is just leaving the
amphitheatre and as the attendants roll back the heavy awnings
and unleash the tent-poles, the moon, which has been excluded
for the performance, begins to filter in, and presently the
stone begins to throw off faint shimmers, and dark shadows fall
across the stage. The builded temple, which has been screened,
is now revealed, and its colours glow again, albeit in shades
not known to the light of day. The porticos of temples look
down upon the theatre, and olive trees stand dark and beautiful
on the hills. From afar the bustle of the town dies away, and,
perhaps, in a moment of unutterable stillness, the murmur of
the many-sounding sea can be heard._
_The spectators of the strange entertainment have at last
departed, and the long e’s, ungrateful to the ear of the Attic
scholar, are heard no more. In the far centre of the theatre
a man is taking apart a mechanism--that from which the deus
sprang in this evening’s play. Two other men remain. One walks
musing and absorbed, looking toward that entrance whereby
Orestes was wont to make his way to the stage. The other walks
slowly round about the theatre, marking its aspects, and
thinking of practical things. Presently they meet at the spot
where once the choragus stood. They salute each other._
MR GRIFFITH
I am sorry that you should have been here to-night. To you, I suppose,
this has been only a sacrilege. I am sorry that you should feel that I
am gloating over my success. But perhaps I am mistaken. Are you, or are
you not, Walter Pritchard Eaton?
MR EATON
I am. And you are David Wark Griffith, are you not? [_D. G. nods._] We
are well met, then--if I may make use of a phrase which the drama, and
not your _métier_ has made famous. By the way, ought I to “register”
pleasure in any conventional way?
D. G.
Score one for you. I have sinned. But since you say we are well met,
can’t we chat for a moment about things? You see, I am not altogether
unaffected by this scene--the light, and the ancient theatre, and the
memories of it all.
W. P. E.
They would all do admirably for a picture--for one of those
extraordinary scenic effects which you create as no other man can
create them. But the memories--those at least are mine. Surely you are
not thinking of--
D. G.
No. Not just now. I am humble at times. But let us say that you are
the great antagonist of the movies, and I the protagonist. I want very
much to understand what you mean when you attack them. I remember you
said that my spectacle, _The Birth of a Nation_, was violently unfair
because it was wordless. Am I not right?
W. P. E.
I said some such thing.
D. G.
And you are a defender of the theatre. May I assume that _The
Clansman_, which was a spoken drama, was more fair than my spectacle?
W. P. E.
At least, in the play, there was a reply in kind to every attack. The
dumb-show for which you are responsible showed only one side.
D. G.
Then you are attacking the movie for being a propaganda, and are
displeased with the propaganda because it is one-sided. May I say that
possibly the movie was made as an artistic spectacle, and had no such
object? And do I not recall the surprise with which such a play as
_Strife_ was received because it did show two sides? After all, I did
not make it impossible for you to put on _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ as a reply
to me.
W. P. E.
It would be fruitless to continue the discussion on this point. I spoke
of your movie in passing, because I am always hearing about it. For the
most part let us admit that it was not cheap. Can you say as much for
the others?
D. G.
No. The movie is a vulgar art--it is _the_ vulgar art. And certainly
I do not purpose to rob that statement of its effectiveness by saying
that the word must be taken in its best, or even in its original,
meaning. It must be taken in its worst meaning. The movie is vulgar,
but it is art. The best of it is none too good--yet. But the worst of
it is not so bad as you think.
W. P. E.
I am willing to grant you that in the representation of spectacle, in
the realm of trick photography and in the preservation of the events
of the moment, the movie has its place. I question it only when it
invades the drama. There you must pardon me. I have the drama close to
my heart.
D. G.
You have been warming the viper quite a long time. It is about to
sting. I am willing to grant you that in musical comedy, in purely
intellectual engagements, and in the exploitation of sound, the drama
has its place. But I have noticed in your own complaints that in the
things that touch the heart, in the grand manner, in the projection of
high emotion, you find the drama of to-day a pretty sad affair.
W. P. E.
Who is to blame for it?
D. G.
Who killed Cock Robin? Not I. I had not heard that the
Comédie-Française was seriously affected by the activities of Pathé
Frères. I have yet to learn that music has been driven into hiding by
the movies, although I have heard that the ride of the Valkyries is
more familiarly known to-day as the “Klan-theme” from _The Birth_.
Didn’t your theatre die--if it has died--because it stifled itself?
Hadn’t you noticed the decline ten years ago?
W. P. E.
I am not blaming the movie. I am deploring it. I do not think that
it is good for people to be eternally fed on whatever is cheapest,
nearest, easiest of comprehension. I object to it all the more when
something high and fine is butchered to make a movie holiday.
D. G.
I deplore that as much as you. I do not think that _Cabiria_ was cheap,
or easy of comprehension. There was enough on the surface to make it
popular. But there was also enough in the depths to make it grand.
W. P. E.
The movie is still two-dimensional, Mr Griffith. Can we speak of depths?
D. G.
Ah, you say “still”! Then we have a future. In the theatre there was a
long succession of little known men, and then came the men whose plays
made these stones sacred to you. There were many Elizabethans before
Shakespeare. Will you call me the Marlowe of the movies? I believe in
them enough to hope for a Shakespeare. But don’t you see that we are
young; we are without conventions--
W. P. E.
Pardon me. You are with far too many. I remember that in the early
days, when you went about on tiptoe for fear of waking up the
revengeful Muses, you employed actors without any technique. There was
an uncouth, a delightful freshness, about your work. I had hopes then
that you would contribute to the stage. Instead you have taken from it.
You have borrowed all its worst conventions. And you have added some of
your own. There is the dreadful convention of registering.
D. G.
Isn’t that from the stage?
W. P. E.
Hardly.
D. G.
Your actors and actresses register.
W. P. E.
Not as yours do. The long training in the expression of emotions has
developed a suitable medium, the slightest variation on which becomes
inestimably precious. In the moving picture the variation is unknown.
And, although I am the last person to want to advantage the movie, let
me tell you why. I can hear the voice of the director, just as the
misguided husband leaves his wife--a favorite situation in the movies
and very novel--I can hear him crying out, “Register grief!” If he
does not cry out, the inner voice of the actress cries out. Not “feel,”
not “express the feeling,” but express the semblance of grief. It is
an art of superficies. Perhaps your actresses--and why, dear sir, do
you choose such impossibly blond, pretty and stupid actresses?--have
worked out a new expression, a new registration. At the terrible moment
they forget. They register as they, or another actress as well paid
and as hotly advertised, registered six months before. I am as tired
of heaving breasts and eyes turned to heaven as I am tired of Charlie
Chaplin’s walk when he does not walk it. Conventions? There is no end
to them. What your art, as you call it, lacks, is limitations.
D. G.
You mean there are no limits to it? That is a strange remark for you to
make.
W. P. E.
No. I do not mean that. I mean that every art, until recent times, has
proposed certain limitations, under which it had to work. Goethe--a
poet whom you have yet to introduce to your spectators--once wrote,
“_In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister!_” And these
limitations must be more than physical. There is no reason why a poem
should rhyme abbaabbacdcdcd, but the sonnet must rhyme in some such
manner, or it will not be perfect. There may be greater poems than
these sonnets--that is a matter of taste--but the art of the sonnet
has its own perfection because those limitations have been accepted
joyously by those who chose to write. You have proposed no limitations
to yourself. Your art is chaos.
D. G.
Didn’t I confess as much when I said it was vulgar? It must have its
appeal to the very lowest. But because our roots are in the dung and
the mire, do you think there shall be no lovely blossoms on the trees
in spring and no fruit? If I make a fortune in raw melodrama, shall I
not spend it on Helen of Troy?
W. P. E.
Helen of Troy?
D. G.
Why not? The moving picture is always elemental, but it can be grand.
What are the essentials of a story: love, beauty, pursuit, coincidence,
rescue--
W. P. E.
Tell me, Mr Griffith, is it true that you recite “The Relief at
Lucknow” each night before you go to bed?
D. G.
Not now. I am reciting the Iliad now. Can’t you see the battlements of
Troy with Helen looking down from her tower--the ruinous face--
W. P. E.
Registering?
D. G.
Again a hit! But I shall overcome it. I shall show you Scamander rising
from his bed, and the gods on high Olympus--
W. P. E.
With a close-up of the beard of Zeus?
D. G.
And Patroclus leaping on the Ilian shore, and Achilles sulking in his
tent. I shall make Homer live again.
W. P. E.
Dear me. Is he dead? Why wasn’t I informed?
D. G.
Love and battle, heroism and beauty, action and emotion, pity and
terror--what more can you ask? All the great sum of Hellenic life, its
morning glow and its great noon of enviable beauty, shall be in my
picture. It shall mingle humanity with the gods again.
W. P. E.
Through the exquisite agency of cutbacks?
D. G.
As surely as Marlowe’s topless towers--the captions are written for
me--rose in the backdrops of your theatres. I shall glorify the
mechanics of my art. I shall make them invisible and divine. I shall
speak in words of white fire--
W. P. E.
Perhaps. But you will never speak with the tongues of angels--and of
men. I will admit the dulness of the theatre if you will grant the
absurdity of the mechanics you employ. I will ask you only if the
moving picture will ever become human?
D. G.
I do not know. I am not sure that humanity is very translatable. But
we have ecstasy. In the projector lies all wonderful adventure, and I
go into a dingy, stuffy, moving-picture house with the foreknowledge
that something strange and wonderful, though it be at times cheap and
vulgar, will be shown me. In a drab world the movie is an instrument
of miracles. The gross caricatures are perhaps truer than the realism
of the theatre. I see a Rabelaisian madness in the millions of broken
plates. In a thousand flying custard pies I recognize an eternal
impulse of humankind. In the mad comings and goings of impossible
characters I still see some persuasion that life is “wanton and
wondrous and forever well.” Here, in this theatre, life was once
glorified. But the grandeur has died out and we must restore it as we
can.
W. P. E.
Not in my time, I fear. For me the past is not dead, so you cannot
restore it. And here, in the end, you have my last objection to the
moving picture. You are destroying the imagination of mankind. There
are no more mysteries since your work has come into being. Everything
is visible. Everything is explained.
D. G.
Except the soul, my dear sir.[4]
“_I am Here To-Day_”:
_Charlie Chaplin_
“I AM HERE TO-DAY”: CHARLIE CHAPLIN
For most of us the grotesque effigy dangling from the electric sign
or propped against the side of the ticket-booth must remain our first
memory of Charlie Chaplin. The splay feet, the moustache, the derby
hat, the rattan walking-stick, composed at once the image which was
ten years later to become the universal symbol of laughter. “_I am
here to-day_” was his legend, and like everything else associated
with his name it is faintly ironic and exactly right. The man who,
of all the men of our time, seems most assured of immortality, chose
that particularly transient announcement of his presence, “I am here
to-day,” with its emotional overtone of “gone to-morrow,” and there is
always something in Charlie that slips away. “He does things,” said
John S. Sargent once, “and you’re lucky if you see them.” Incredibly
lucky to live when we have the chance to see them.
It is a miracle that there should arise in our time a figure wholly
in the tradition of the great clowns--a tradition requiring creative
energy, freshness, inventiveness, change--for neither the time nor the
country in which Charlie works is exceptionally favourable to such a
phenomenon. Stranger still is the course he has run. It is simple to
take _The Kid_ as the dividing line, but it is more to the point to
consider the phases of Charlie’s popularity, for each phase corresponds
to one of the attacks now being made upon his integrity. He is on the
top of the world, an exposed position, and we are all sniping at him;
even his adherents are inclined to say that “after all” he is “still”
this or the other thing. One goes to his pictures as one went to hear
Caruso, with a ghoulish speculation as to the quantity of alloy in the
“golden voice.” It is because Charlie has had all there ever was of
acclaim that he is now surrounded by deserters.
[Illustration: CHARLIE CHAPLIN. By E. E. Cummings]
That he exists at all is due to the camera and to the selective genius
of Mack Sennett. It is impossible to dissociate him entirely from the
Keystone comedy where he began and worked wonders and learned much.
The injustice of forgetting Sennett and the Keystone when thinking
of Chaplin has undermined most of the intellectual appreciation of
his work, for although he was the greatest of the Keystone comedians
and passed far beyond them, the first _and decisive_ phase of his
popularity came while he was with them, and the Keystone touch remains
in all his later work, often as its most precious element. It was
the time of Charlie’s actual contact with the American people, the
movie-going populace before the days of the great moving pictures.
He was the second man to be known widely by name--John Bunny was the
first--and he achieved a fame which passed entirely by word of mouth
into the category of the common myths and legends of America, as the
name of Buffalo Bill had passed before. By the time the newspapers
recognized the movie as a source of circulation, Charlie was
already a known quantity in the composition of the American mind and,
what is equally significant, he had created the first _Charlot_. The
French name which is and is not Charlie will serve for that figure
on the screen, the created image which is, and at the same time is
more than, Charlie Chaplin, and is less. Like every great artist in
whatever medium, Charlie has created the mask of himself--many masks,
in fact--and the first of these, the wanderer, came in the Keystone
comedies. It was there that he first detached himself from life and
began to live in another world, with a specific rhythm of his own, as
if the pulse-beat in him changed and was twice or half as fast as that
of those who surrounded him. He created then that trajectory across the
screen which is absolutely his own line of movement. No matter what
the actual facts are, the curve he plots is always the same. It is of
one who seems to enter from a corner of the screen, becomes entangled
or involved in a force greater than himself as he advances upward and
to the centre; there he spins like a marionette in a whirlpool, is
flung from side to side, always in a parabola which seems centripetal
until the madness of the action hurls him to refuge or compels him to
flight at the opposite end of the screen. He wanders in, a stranger, an
impostor, an anarchist; and passes again, buffeted, but unchanged.
The Keystone was the time of his wildest grotesquerie (after _Tillie’s
Punctured Romance_, to be sure), as if he needed, for a beginning,
sharply to contrast his rhythm, his gait, his gesture, _mode_, with
the actual world outside. His successes in this period were confined
to those films in which the world intruded with all its natural
crassness upon his detached existence. There was a film in which
Charlie dreamed himself back into the Stone Age and played the God of
the Waters--wholly without success because he contrasted his fantasy
with another fantasy in the same tempo, and could neither sink into
nor stand apart from it. But in _His Night Out_ the effect is perfect,
and is intensified by the alternating coincidence and syncopation of
rhythm in which Ben Turpin worked with him. Charlie’s drunken line
of march down a stairway was first followed in parallel and then
in not-quite-parallel by Turpin; the degree of drunkenness was the
same, then varied, then returned to identity; and the two, together,
were always entirely apart from the actuality of bars and hotels and
fountains and policemen which were properties in their existence.
In this early day Charlie had already mastered his principles. He
knew that the broad lines are funny and that the fragments--which
are delicious--must “point” the main line of laughter. I recall,
for example, an exquisite moment at the end of this film. Turpin is
staggering down the street, dragging Charlie by the collar. Essentially
the funny thing is that one drunkard should so gravely, so soberly,
so obstinately take care of another and should convert himself into a
policeman to do it; it is funny that they should be going nowhere, and
go so doggedly. The lurching-forward body of Turpin, the singular angle
formed with it by Charlie’s body almost flat on the ground, added to
the spectacle. And once as they went along Charlie’s right hand fell
to one side, and as idly as a girl plucks a water-lily from over the
side of a canoe he plucked a daisy from the grass border of the path,
and smelled it. The function of that gesture was to make everything
that went before, and everything that came after, seem funnier; and it
succeeded by creating another, incongruous image out of the picture
before our eyes. The entire world, a moment earlier, had been aslant
and distorted and wholly male; it righted itself suddenly and created
a soft idyll of tenderness. Nearly everything of Charlie is in that
moment, and I know no better way to express its elusive quality than
to say that as I sat watching the film a second time, about two hours
later, the repetition of the gesture came with all the effect of
surprise, although I had been wondering whether he could do it so
perfectly again.
This was the Charlie whom little children came to know before any other
and whose name they added to their prayers. He was then popular with
the people; he was soon to become universally known and admired--the
Charlie of _The Bank_ and of _Shoulder Arms_; and finally he became
“the great artist” in _The Kid_. The second period is pure development;
the third is change; and the adherents of each join with the earlier
enthusiasts to instruct and alarm their idol. No doubt the middle phase
is the one which is richest in memory. It includes the masterpieces _A
Dog’s Life_, _The Pawnshop_, _The Vagabond_, _Easy Street_, as well as
the two I have just mentioned, and, if I am not mistaken, the _genre_
pictures like _The Floorwalker_, _The Fireman_, _The Immigrant_, and
the fantastic _Cure_. To name these pictures is to call to mind their
special scenes, the atmosphere in which they were played: the mock
heroic of _The Bank_ and its parody of passion; the unbelievable scene
behind the curtain in _A Dog’s Life_; Charlie as policeman in _Easy
Street_, which had some of the beginnings of _The Kid_; Charlie left
marking time alone after the squad had marched away in the film which
made camp life supportable. Compare them with the very earliest films,
_The Pile Driver_ and the wheel-chairman film and so on: the later ones
are richer in inventiveness, the texture is more solid, the emotions
grow more complex, and the interweaving of tenderness and gravity
with the fun becomes infinitely more deft. In essence it is the same
figure--he is still a vagrant, an outsider; only now when he becomes
entangled in the lives of other people he is a bit of a crusader, too.
The accidental does not occur so frequently; the progress of each
film is plotted in advance; there is a definite rise and fall as in
_A Dog’s Life_, where the climax is in the curtain scene toward which
tends the first episode of the dog and from which the flight and the
rustic idyll flow gently downward. The pace in the earlier pictures
was more instinctive. In _The Count_ the tempo is jerky; it moves from
extreme to extreme. Yet one gets the sense of the impending flight
beautifully when, at the close, Charlot as the bogus count has been
shown up and is fleeing pell-mell through every room in the house;
the whole movement grows tense; the rate of acceleration perceptibly
heightens as Charlot slides in front of a vast birthday cake, pivots on
his heel, and begins to play alternate pool and golf with the frosting,
making every shot count like a machine gunner barricaded in a pill-box
or a bandit in a deserted cabin.
It was foreordained that the improvised kind of comedy should give way
to something more calculated, and in Charlie’s case it is particularly
futile to cry over spilled milk because for a long time he continued to
give the _effect_ of impromptu; his sudden movements and his finds in
the way of unsuspected sources of fun are exceptional to this day. In
_The Pawnshop_[5] Charlie begins to sweep and catches in his broom the
end of a long rope, which, instead of being swept away, keeps getting
longer, actively fighting the broom. I have no way to prove it, but I
am sure from the context that this is all he had originally had in mind
to do with the scene. Suddenly the tape on the floor creates something
in his mind, and Charlie transforms the back room of the pawnshop into
a circus, with himself walking the tight rope--a graceful, nimble
balancing along the thin line of tape on the floor, the quick turn
and coming forward, the conventional bow, arms flung out, smiling,
to receive applause at the end. Again, as ever, he has created an
imaginary scene out of the materials of the actual.
The plotting of these comedies did not destroy Charlie’s inventiveness
and made it possible for him to develop certain other of his
characteristics. The moment the vagrant came to rest, the natural
man appeared, the paradoxical creature who has the wisdom of simple
souls and the incalculable strength of the weak. Charlie all through
the middle period is at least half Tyl Eulenspiegl. It is another
way for him to live apart from the world by assuming that the world
actually means what it says, by taking every one of its conventional
formulas, its polite phrases and idioms, with dreadful seriousness.
He has created in Charlot a radical with an extraordinarily logical
mind. Witness Charlot arriving late at the theatre and stepping on the
toes of a whole row of people to his seat at the far end; the gravity
of his expressions of regret is only matched by his humiliation when
he discovers that he is, after all, in the wrong row and makes his
way back again and all through the next row to his proper place.
It is a careful exaggeration of the social fiction that when you
apologise you can do anything to anyone. The same feeling underlies
the characteristic moment when Charlot is fighting and suddenly stops,
takes off his hat and coat, gives them to his opponent to hold, and
then promptly knocks his obliging adversary down. Revisiting once an
old Charlie, I saw him do this, and a few minutes later saw the same
thing in a new Harold Lloyd; all there is to know of the difference
between the two men was to be learned there; for Lloyd, who is a clever
fellow, made it seem a smart trick so to catch his enemy off guard,
while Chaplin made the moment equal to the conventional crossing of
swords or the handshake before a prize fight. Similarly, the salutation
with the hat takes seriously a social convention and carries it as far
as it can go. In _Pay Day_ Charlot arrives late to work and attempts
to mollify the furious construction-gang boss by handing him an Easter
lily.
_The Kid_ was undoubtedly a beginning in “literature” for Charlie. I
realize that in admitting this I am giving the whole case away, for
in the opinion of certain critics the beginning of literature is the
end of creative art. This attitude is not so familiar in America, but
in France you hear the Charlot of _The Kid_ spoken of as “theatre,”
as one who has ceased to be of the film entirely. I doubt if this is
just. Like the one other great artist in America (George Herriman, with
whom he is eminently in sympathy), Charlie has always had the Dickens
touch, a thing which in its purity we do not otherwise discover in our
art. Dickens himself is mixed; only a part of him is literature, and
that not the best, nor is that part essentially the one which Charlie
has imported to the screen. _The Kid_ had some bad things in it: the
story, the halo round the head of the unmarried mother, the quarrel
with the authorities; it had an unnecessary amount of realism and its
tempo was uncertain, for it was neither serious film nor Keystone. Yet
it possessed moments of unbelievable intensity and touches of high
imagination. The scenes in and outside the doss-house were excellent
and were old Charlie; the glazier’s assistant was inventive and the
training of Coogan to look like his foster-father was beautiful. Far
above them stood the beginning of the film: Charlot, in his usual
polite rags, strolling down to his club after his breakfast (it would
have been a grilled bone) and, avoiding slops as Villon did, twirling
his cane, taking off his fingerless gloves to reach for his cigarette
case (a sardine box), and selecting from the butts one of quality,
_tamping it_ to shake down the excess tobacco at the tip--all of this,
as Mr Herriman pointed out to me, was the creation of the society
gentleman, the courageous refusal to be undermined by slums and poverty
and rags. At the end of the film there was the vision of heaven:
apotheosis of the long suffering of Charlot at the hands of the police,
not only in _The Kid_--in a hundred films where he stood always against
the authorities, always for his small independent freedom. The world in
which even policemen have wings shatters, too; but something remains.
The invincible Charlot, dazed by his dream, looking for wings on the
actual policeman who is apparently taking him to jail, will not down.
For as they start, a post comes between them, and Charlot, without the
slightest effort to break away, too submissive to fight, still dodges
back to walk round the post and so avoid bad luck. A moment later comes
one of the highest points in Charlie’s career. He is ushered into a
limousine instead of a patrol wagon--it is the beginning of the happy
ending. And as the motor starts he flashes at the spectators of his
felicity a look of indescribable poignancy. It is frightened, it is
hopeful, bewildered; it lasts a fraction of a second and is blurred by
the plate glass of the car. I cannot hope to set down the quality of
it, how it becomes a moment of unbearable intensity, and how one is
breathless with suspense--and with adoration.
For, make no mistake, it is adoration, not less, that he deserves
and has from us. He corresponds to our secret desires because he
alone has passed beyond our categories, at one bound placing himself
outside space and time. His escape from the world is complete and
extraordinarily rapid, and what makes him more than a figure of
romance is his immediate creation of another world. He has the vital
energy, the composing and the functioning brain. This is what makes
him æsthetically interesting, what will make him for ever a school not
only of acting, but of the whole creative process. The flow of his line
always corresponds to the character and tempo; there is a definite
relation between the melody and the orchestration he gives it. Beyond
his technique--the style of his pieces--he has composition, because he
creates anything but chaos in his separate world. “You might,” wrote Mr
Stark Young, wise in everything but the choice of the person addressed,
“you might really create in terms of the moving picture as you have
already created in terms of character.” As I have said, the surest way
to be wrong about Charlie is to forget the Keystone.
This is precisely what Mr Stark Young would like him to do--and what
Charlie may do if the intellectual nonsense about him is capable of
corrupting his natural wisdom and his creative gift. Mr Young has
addressed an open letter to “Dear Mr Chaplin”[6] in which he suggests
that Charlie play _Liliom_ and _He Who Gets Slapped_ and _Peer Gynt_.
(Offended as I am by these ideas, I must be fair. Mr Young does say
that better than all of these, “you could do new things written by or
for you, things in which you would use your full endowment, comic
and otherwise ... develop things calculated strictly for it [the
screen] and for no other art, made up out of its essential quality,
which is visual motion and not mere stage drama photographed....”)
This is, of course, corruption. It means that Mr Young has either not
seen the Charlie of before _The Kid_ (as I suspect from the phrase
about creating in terms of character) or not liked him (which I am
sure about); he has failed to recognize in _The Pawnbroker_ “his full
endowment, comic and otherwise.” It implies to me that Mr Young would
prefer a “serious film” and that suggests the complete absence of a
critical sense, of taste and gusto, of wisdom and gaiety, of piety and
wit. “The larger field” ... “serious efforts” ... “a more cultured
audience” ... “the judicious”--O Lord! these are the phrases which
are offered as bribes to the one man who has destroyed the world and
created it in his own image!
There is a future for him as for others, and it is quite possible that
the future may not be as rich and as dear as the past. I write this
without having seen _The Pilgrim_, which ought to be a test case,
for the two films which followed _The Kid_ (_Pay Day_ and _The Idle
Class_) determined nothing. If the literary side conquers we shall
have a great character actor and not a creator; we shall certainly
not have again the image of riot and fun, the created personage, the
annihilation of actuality; we may go so far as to accomplish Mr Stark
Young’s ideal and have a serious work of art. I hope this will not
happen, because I do not believe that it is the necessary curve of
Charlie’s genius--it is the direction of worldly success, not in money,
but in fame; it is not the curve of life at all. For the slowing-up
of Charlie’s physical energies and the deepening of his understanding
may well restore to him his appreciation of those early monuments to
laughter which are his greatest achievement. He stood then shod in
absurdity, but with his feet on the earth. And he danced on the earth,
an eternal figure of lightness and of the wisdom which knows that the
earth was made to dance on. It was a green earth, excited with its own
abundance and fruitfulness, and he possessed it entirely. For me he
remains established in possession. As it spins under his feet he dances
silently and with infinite grace upon it. It is as if in his whole life
he had spoken only one word: “I am here _to-day_”--the beginning before
time and the end without end of his wisdom and of his loveliness.
_Say It With Music_
SAY IT WITH MUSIC
The popular song is never forgotten--except in public. Great events and
seven-day-wonders pass into oblivion. Hobson, who was a hero, became
a prohibitionist; Aguinaldo, a good citizen; McKinley, a martyr--but
_Good-by, Dolly Gray_, _In the Good Old Summer Time_, and _Just Break
the News to Mother_ are immortal in our private memories and around
them crystallize the sights and sounds and smells, the very quality
of the air we breathed when these songs were in their high day. A
more judicious pen than mine may write about these songs without
sentimentality; I cannot. For in addition to the pathos of time past,
something else brings an air of gentle melancholy to “words and music.”
In recent years a change has come and the popular song is no longer
written to be sung, but to be played. The new song that can’t be sung
has virtues of its own--on the whole they are virtues I prefer. But
I doubt whether it will ever be, as the old song was, a clue to the
social history of our time.
The popular song is so varied, so full of interest, that for a
moment at least one can pretend that it isn’t vulgar, detestable,
the ruin of musical taste, and a symptom of degeneracy; we can
pretend also that _Less Than the Dust_ isn’t more artistic than
_Swanee_. Since the Spanish-American War the American popular song
(including the foreign song popular in America) has undergone the
most interesting modulations; it has expressed everything except _fin
de siècle_. Out of the ’nineties persisted a characteristic song:
_Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, the chorus and tune of which, woven into
mysterious words about “three little niggers in a peanut shell” I
must have heard at the same time as _Daisy_ with its glorification
of the simple life “on a bicycle built for two.” Since then, for a
rough generalization, we have had three types of popular song: the
exotic-romantic, the sentimental, and the raggy-gay. The sentimental
song we have always with us. “That sweet melody with a strong mother
appeal” is advertised on the back of “Those Black Boy Blues” and Irving
Berlin writes _When I Lost You_ between _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and
_Some Sunny Day_. At moments it is dominant and a fake ballad, with
a simple and uninteresting tune, makes _After the Ball_, by Charles
K. Harris, a world wonder. Or we have a simplification of the whole
history of romantic love in _Love Me and the World Is Mine_. The
curious about social life in America may compare this song with _I’m
Just Wild About Harry_.
Beaumarchais, who knew no jazz, makes Figaro say that what can’t be
said can be sung--and this applies far more to the sentimental than to
the obscene. Think of the incredible, the almost unspeakable idea in
the following, presumably spoken by a father to a child:
Down in the City of Sighs and Tears,
Down by the White Light’s Glare,
Down in the something of wasted years,
You’ll find your mamma there!
Or consider the pretty imagery and emotion of _I’m Tying the Leaves_,
as sung by a precocious and abominable child who has been told that
mother will die when the leaves begin to fall. It would be easy to say
that these songs are gone never to return; but it was only two years
ago that _They Needed a Songbird in Heaven--so God Took Caruso Away_
(“idea suggested by George Walter Brown” to the grateful composers). I
do not dare to contemplate _A Baby’s Prayer at Twilight_ or to wonder
what constituted the _Curse of an Aching Heart_; but history has left
on record the chorus of
My Mother was a Lady
Like yours, you will allow,
And you may have a sister
Who needs protection now;
I’ve come to this great city
To find a brother dear,
And you wouldn’t dare insult me, sir,
If Jack were only here.
It was for songs like this that a masterpiece in another _genre_,
the burlesque popular song, was created. I have heard _A Working
Girl Was Leaving Home_ credited to the brothers Smith (the boys the
mother-in-law joke invented, according to George Jean Nathan, and for
their sins they should have written this song) and to the late Tiny
Maxwell, and to an unidentified English source. It’s title and chorus
at least are immortal:
(Then to him these proud words this girl did say):
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 de-mi tasses,
But Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.
The cure for the sentimental song is the ironic; and irony, it
happens, is not what America lives on. Even so mild an English example
as _Waiting at the Church_ gained its popularity chiefly from the
excellent tag line:
Can’t get away
To marry you to-day.
My wife won’t let me.
Yet appearing from time to time we had a sort of frank destruction of
sentimentality in our songs. Some, like _I Picked up a Lemon in the
Garden of Love_, appeal directly to the old “peaches” tradition; but
we went further. In the same year as the romantic _Beautiful Garden of
Roses_--it was one of the early years of the dance craze--we heard _Who
Are You With To-night_ (to-night?...) down to “Will you tell your wife
in the morning, Who you are with to-night?” and the music perceptibly
winked at the words. _I Love My Wife (but, Oh, You Kid!)_ had little
quality, but the dramatization of an old joke in _My Wife’s Gone to the
Country_ rose to a definite gaiety in the cry of “Hooray! Hooray!” So,
too, one line in the chorus of _I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now_, a song
which skilfully builds up a sentimental situation in order to tear it
down with two words:
Wonder who’s looking into her eyes,
Breathing sighs, telling lies ...
where the music pretended to make no difference between the last two
phrases, except for softening, sweetening the second. Yet another in
the malicious mould is _Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle (when
Rip Van Winkle Went Away)_--unforgettable for the tearing upward phrase
to a climax in the first _Rip_ with a parallel high note on the second.
The characteristic of these songs is that they were rather like
contemporary fiction in giving form to social phenomena without
expressing approval or disapproval. Eternal love and fidelity go by
the board with “the dreamy, peachy, creamy, Vision of pure delight,”
the companion who will not be mentioned to “your wife in the morning.”
“Tell me, Mister, Is it your sister....” Well, hardly.
There were, beside these realistic treatments of marriage (I continue
the professorial tone) a few slightly suggestive songs, and these
also were opposed to current morality, and these also were popular.
One was called, I think, _Billy_, and purported to be a statement of
virginal devotion: “And when I walk, I always walk with Billy ...” and
so following, to “And when I sleep, I always--dream of Bill.” There
were delicious implications in _Row, Row, Row_, as Al Jolson sang it;
earlier still was Hattie Williams’s song _Experience_, in _The Little
Cherub_. The persistence of these songs is something of a miracle and
the shade of difference between the permissible and the impossible
is of vast importance in the success of a song. About fifteen years
separate _Who Are You With To-Night?_ (I quote all these songs and
titles from memory, but I am fairly sure about the grammar of this
one; if it was printed “whom” it was sung “who”) and _He May be Your
Man (but he comes to see me sometimes)_, and the second song is more
explicit; when Edith Wilson or Florence Mills sang the repeat chorus
it shocked her audience. Essentially it is the same thing, only,
fifteen years ago, the questionable stanza would have been left to the
unauthorized street version.
The exotic romantic song in America has little to do with all of this.
Before the professional glorification of our separate states began,
we had the series of Indian songs of which Neil Moret’s _Hiawatha_
is the outstanding exemplar. The stanza is almost as hard to sing
as _The Star-spangled Banner_; the chorus--it is always the chorus
which makes a song--is banal, a pure rum-tum-tiddy. Yet it was more
than popular, for it engendered a hundred others. _Cheyenne_ and
(musically) _Rainbow_ are its descendants. _Hiawatha_ bewilders and
baffles the searcher after causes; but its badness as a song explains
why the Indian song was submerged presently in the great wave of negro
songs which have shown an amazing vitality, have outlived the Hawaiian
exotic, and with marvelous adaptability (aided by one great natural
advantage) have lived through to the present day.
The negro song is partly, but not purely, exotic. Remembering that
songs are written on Forty-fifth Street in New York and put over in
New York cabarets, it is easy to see how _California in September_ (a
dreadful song) and _Carolina_ (I recall five songs embodying the name
of that state; the latest is superb) are also exotic; and how _Over on
the Jersey Side_ and songs about Coney Island came to be written to
glorify New York as a summer resort. The rustic period, again, reacts
against sophistication as _In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree_ reacts
against the exoticism of the sheltering palm. Neither rustic nor local,
however, achieves the highest success, and it is left for the Pacific
to give the last setting before the shouting song of the negro and his
plaintive cry are triumphant in our music.
First, however, the era of the waltz song. In earlier days America
had little to do with the waltz out of comic opera and _The Merry
Widow_ and _My Hero_ and _Beautiful Lady_ and the superb melodies from
_Gypsy Love_ and from _Die Czardas Fürstin_, of which I forget the
American name, and something from _The Arcadians_ came from anywhere
across the sea and captured us. The _Velia Song_ and _The Girl from
the Saskatchewan_ were better than their corresponding waltzes; _The
Chocolate Soldier_ had pages of music as good as _My Hero_--many
better. Only _The Dollar Princess_ managed to put over its less
ostentatious pieces--and that is rather amusing, since Leo Fall is held
by the Viennese to be the true successor of Johann Strauss.
The mention of that great name makes it clear that the waltz song
itself is a hybrid; for whatever words have been sung to _The Beautiful
Blue Danube_, the music was meant to be played and for the dance; it
was not meant for song. Yet the slow tempo, the softness, the gentle
sentimentality of the waltz lends itself peculiarly to song--and to
memory. I do not think it has anything to do with the really great
things in our popular songs, but I cannot resent its success--any
more than I can resent the success of another song, wholly out of our
American line--_Un Peu d’Amour_. This was the last great song before
the war; it held France and England and America enslaved to its amorous
longing. Something more cheery and more male had to be found for the
English soldier, who eventually picked up _Tipperary_ (also a song
of nostalgia), and for the American something snappier; but _Un Peu
d’Amour_ persisted during the war. To hear a soldier standing on the
fire-step on a dark night, leaning his cheek against the disc of his
Lewis gun, and softly humming _Un Peu d’Amour_, was to recognize that
for actual millions that song and a few others like it, and not the
great music to the condition of which all art aspires, were all of
beauty and all of exaltation they were ever to know. The materials in
this particular case were not tawdry, only equivocal. For it was a
better song as _A Little Love_ than in the French. The word _amour_
means, but does not signify, the same thing as the word love, and
“_pour t’entendre à ce moment suprême, Murmurer tout bas, tout bas: Je
t’aime_” has connotations not transferred to the English. The song is
a fake French and a good Anglo-Saxon piece of sentiment, precisely the
counterpart of the waltz song. Like them it conquered a world.
Lehar and Monckton and Caryll and Fall and Kalman followed successes
with moderate failure, and at the same time revues and American musical
comedies stepped out grandly. I note three songs from this source which
actually claimed all of the popular attention. The song to be sung was
at its best in the Princess shows--best of all in _The Siren Song_
from _Leave it to Jane_. It is Mr Kern’s masterpiece, a sophisticated,
tidy score with amusing and unexpected retards and pauses, with a
fresh freedom of tonalities. _The Siren Song_ never actually came up
to _The Love Nest_ in acclaim; Mr Hirsch’s bid for immortality is
almost contemptible in words and music and has only a single point of
interest--the three notes against two in the second line of the chorus
(“cozyandwarm” instead of, say, nice--and--warm). It is impermissible
in a man who only a year later wrote _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old
Broadway_.
The third song is _Say It With Music_. Mr Berlin is as much
responsible as any one for the turn from the song-to-be-sung to the
song-to-be-played; yet he is so remarkable that he can reverse himself,
and just as in 1915 he produced a whole revue (_Stop! Look! Listen!_)
from which not one song became really popular, so, seven years later,
when the singing-song had gone out, he produced a revue and gave us one
more of his tributes to the art he adores. It isn’t musically half as
interesting as _I Love a Piano_; but it is much more singable and it
has great virtues. Nothing that a jazz orchestra can do has any effect
on the purity of its musical line. I wonder whether it may not be the
last of the songs; for we are now full in the jazz age and darkness has
set in.
_Tearing a Passion
to Ragtime_
TEARING A PASSION TO RAGTIME
There is only one sense in which the word “rag” has any meaning in
connexion with music, and that is not conveyed in the word “ragtime.”
Ragtime is not, strictly speaking, time at all; neither is _tempo
rubato_: and eminently safe composers have been known to score their
music _con alcuna licenza_, which leaves the delicate adjustment of
time to the performer. A certain number of liberties may be taken
with ragtime, and beyond this point no liberties may be taken. Within
its framework, ragtime is definite enough; and you must syncopate at
precisely the right, the indicated and required moment, or the effect
of the syncopation is lost.
It is only when one looks at the songs that one realizes what ragtime
means. For literally, the music, which has always been with us and
yet arrived only yesterday, has torn to rags the sentimentality of
the song which preceded it. The funeral oration for the popular song
was preached in the preceding chapter. This is the coroner’s inquest,
with the probable verdict that the popular song was unintentionally
killed by ragtime, which is in turn being slowly poisoned by jazz. A
neat, unobtrusive, little man with bright eyes and an unerring capacity
for understanding, appropriating, and creating strange rhythms is in
the foreground, attended by negro slaves; behind him stands a rather
majestic figure, pink and smooth, surrounded by devils with muted
brass and saxophones. They are Irving Berlin and Paul Whiteman, and
they will bear listening to. What is more, they will make listening a
pleasure.
It seems strange to speak of the great George M. Cohan as a
disappointment in anything he has ever tried; but looking back at the
early years of the century, when it was apparent that he would be our
most popular song writer as well as our most popular everything else,
suddenly calls to mind that our Georgie, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, just
failed to make it. Irish wit and an extraordinary aptitude for putting
into simple song the most obvious of jingo sentiments were not quite
enough. The situation which Cohan faced at the time was beginning to be
complicated: the ballad song was becoming a bore; the substitutes for
it had failed to absorb rhythms fresh enough and swift enough to please
the public. And between dawn and daylight ragtime was upon us.
_Enfin_ Berlin _vient_! How much ragtime had been sung and played
before, no man may calculate; it had been heard in every minstrel
show, and its musical elements were thoroughly familiar. What was
needed was a crystallization, was one song which should take the whole
dash and energy of ragtime and carry it to its apotheosis; with a
characteristic turn of mind Berlin accomplished this in a song which
had no other topic than ragtime itself. _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_
appeared with its bow to negro music and its introduction of _Swanee
River_; it was simple and passionate and utterly unsentimental and
the whole country responded to its masterful cry, _Come on and hear!_
Presently _Waiting for the Robert E. Lee_ is heard--a levee song and
one would say that the South had already conquered; but Berlin is first
of all a writer of rag and the Southern theme is dropped (the negro
music remaining) while he gives the world two further dazzling rags:
_The International_ and _The Ragtime Violin_. Everybody’s doing it
was true of singing and dancing and--composing. For the day which was
awakened with _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ was a day of extraordinary
energy and _Skeleton Rags_ and _Yiddische Rags_ and _Pullman Porters’
Balls_, and everything that could be syncopated, and most things
that could not, paid their quota to ragtime. There have been periods
equally definable: the time of the waltz song, of the ballad, of jazz.
What makes the first rag period important was its intense gaiety,
its naïveté, its tireless curiosity about itself, its unconscious
destruction of the old ballad form and the patter song. The music drove
ahead; the half-understood juggling with tempo which was to become
the characteristic of our music led to fresh accents, a dislocation
of the beat, and to a greater freedom in the text. For half a century
syncopation had existed in America, anticipating the moment when the
national spirit should find in it its perfect expression; for that half
century serious musicians had neglected it; they were to study it a
decade later when ragtime had revealed it to them.
The early rags were made to be sung and they were sung, universally.
What the departing queen of Hawaii offered in _Aloha Ohe_ was swiftly
integrated into the existing form and _On the Beach at Wai-ki-ki_
is a rag in every respect, using material which is foreign only in
appearance. (The fact that ragtime can without offense adapt the folk
song of nearly every nation--and is only absurd with Puccini and
Verdi’s worst when it takes them seriously--indicates how essentially
decent an art ragtime is.) The nostalgia which later came into
Hawaiian songs does not exist in this first greatly popular song of
those islands any more than it exists in the _Robert E. Lee_ or in
_When that Midnight Chu-chu Leaves for Alabam’_. Berlin himself was
not untouched by the Hawaiian scene and in _The Hula-Hula_ he wrote a
song superior, in my mind, to _Wai-ki-ki_, yet never popular in the
great sense. The rush and excitement of _Wai-ki-ki_ aren’t in _The
Hula-Hula_; some one had told too much about the undulations of the
dance and the sensuousness of the southern Pacific. Louis Hirsch, years
later, did the same thing in _’Neath the South Sea Moon_, a respectable
piece of work. But it remained for Jerome Kern, a decade and more
after _Wai-ki-ki_, to make another Hawaiian song popular. This was
_Ka-lu-a_ (out of _Good Morning, Dearie_) and in every way it showed
cleverness and intelligence. For it was not a song of Hawaii at all.
It was produced in an Englishy garden, sung by women in hoopskirts
surrounding Oscar Shaw in evening clothes; and it is all, all a longing
for--I think it is a longing for Wai-ki-ki the song, as much as for the
beach. The old romantic properties are in the words, slightly set off
in mockery by the premature and internal rhymes; they are suffused with
memory and the music is purely nostalgic. It was not for nothing that
Mr Kern wrote _The Siren Song_.
The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South, and here
the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high check.
An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude that
the American people had a complex about nigger mammies and that the
sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation
is simpler. The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in
the pictures and in song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same
reason as cotton fields and pickaninnies and Georgia--because our
whole present music is derived from the negro and most composers of
popular songs haven’t yet discovered that the musical structure is
applicable to other themes as well. (George Gershwin’s _Walking Home
with Angeline_ in _Our Nell_, Cole Porter’s _Blue Boy Blues_, about
the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin’s _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to
the Devil_ are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished,
and gratifying, too. Best of all is _Limehouse Blues_, by Philip
Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the _genre_.) There exist a number
of natural themes--slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin,
the food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan
Alley has worked upon this material, and in both words and music has
been amazingly imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking
a theme and so handling it that the slightest variation from the
preceding use of the same material shall give the effect of novelty
and freshness is a sound one--we know from the history of Greek drama.
Alas! there was little novelty and the tradition was never firm enough
to bear what they did to it. Yet they had their reward, if they can
accept it vicariously, for one of them, not at the beginning and not
at the end, which is not yet, took the old material and fashioned a
great song. His name is George Gershwin and the song which, before the
blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is _Swanee_. To have heard Al
Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great experiences
which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it without
feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate life
of its own coming into being, is--I should say it is not to be alive.
The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the
subtly divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the
name “Swanee,” with a strong beat, long drawn and tender, ushers
in the swift passages leading to the repetition, slow again, of the
name; and the rest of the song is the proper working out of a problem
in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics. After the chorus, and in
another key, there is a coda, a restatement of the theme with a little
more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully, for the first
time the introduction of the final bars of _Swanee River_. I analyze
this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it remain;
the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection because
it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch. Mr
Gershwin has progressed[7] in his technical handling of syncopation,
as in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_ (not primarily a song to be sung or for
the dance, but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in
pauses, and the answer is delicious); but in _Swanee_ he is at his
highest point, for he has taken the simple emotion of longing and let
it surge through his music, he has made real what a hundred before him
had falsified. He should “do it again.”
[Illustration:
IRVING BERLIN
]
_Swanee_ was popular, but by no means as popular as _Some Sunny Day_, a
song by Mr Berlin which will simply not bear analysis. I hold Mr Berlin
to be still the foremost writer of popular music in spite of it. Three
years and a masterly technique separate the two songs and _Some Sunny
Day_ is devilishly clever, but most of it isn’t properly singable.
It is a good dance tune; analyzed, it resolves itself into a weak
treatment of _Old Black Joe_ (clever Mr Berlin to take the first bar of
the old _verse_ for the first bar of his _chorus_) and a regrettable
quotation again of _Swanee River_. The arrangement is neat, and the
inversion of the first bar halfway through the chorus, when the song
has dribbled into meaningless fragments, has lost all intensity and is
suddenly revived and refreshed, while the words of the first bar are
repeated--that sufficiently indicates the master hand. The words are
among Mr Berlin’s weakest and it is hard to believe that at the same
moment he was revelling in the two _Music Box Revues_, in _Say It With
Music_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_, which are superb.
It is not entirely an accident that a consideration of the effect of
ragtime on popular song begins and ends with Irving Berlin. For as
surely as _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ started something, _Pack Up Your
Sins_ is a sign that it is coming to an end. For this tremendous piece
of music simply cannot be sung; it baffled the trained chorus on its
first appearance, it can hardly be whistled through, and, although
the words are good, they aren’t known. Ragtime is now written for
jazz orchestra; three phrases occupy the time of two; four, five, and
even six notes the time of two or three. The words which are becoming
wittier than ever are too numerous, too jostled, to be sung, and the
melodic structure with arbitrarily changing beat baffles the voice and
the mind as much as it intrigues the pulse and the heel. The popular
song and the ragtime song are vanishing temporarily. But something
terrible and wonderful has already taken their place. Already there is
an indication of how they will return and--I am tired of speaking of
Mr Berlin, but I can’t help it--Mr Berlin has indicated how and where.
His _All by Myself_ is in essence a combination of the sentimental song
with ragtime--so it was sung by Ethel Levey. And it is played with
enthusiasm by jazz orchestras--a perceptible pleasure is ours from
recognizing something entirely simple and sentimental weaving its way
through those recondite harmonies.
If the song returns in any way the ancient protest against its
vulgarity will also return, and it is worth making up our minds
about it now. The popular song takes its place between the folk song
and the art song. Of these the folk song hardly exists in America
to-day: _Casey Jones_ and _Frankie and Johnny_ are examples of what
we possess and one doesn’t often hear them sung along country roads
or by brown-armed men at the rudder in ships that go down to the sea.
The songs of the Kentucky mountains (English in provenance) and the
old cowboy songs are both the object of antiquarian interest--they
aren’t as alive as the universal _Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here_ or
_We Won’t Go Home ’til Morning_. If we refuse to call our ragtime folk
music, then we must face the fact that we are at a moment in history
when folk songs simply do not occur. (Even the war failed to give
us very much; it is interesting to note that besides _Katy_ and _Mr
Zip_, the songs written by the best and most expert of our composers,
Berlin and Cohan, were both meant to be sung and were sung--and this
took place in the midst of the change to the unsingable type.) At the
opposite extreme is the art song--usually the setting and degradation
of a poem written for its own sake and usually--let us say dull. The
composers of art songs are about fifty paces behind the symphonists
and the symphonists are nearly nowhere. The result is that we aren’t
in any sense _nourished_ by the writers of art songs and, since we are
a musical people, for better or for worse we fall back on the popular
song. It is to me a question whether we would be better citizens and
more noble in the sight of God if we sang _Narcissus_ instead of _The
Girl on the Magazine Cover_.
Once in a while something between the art and the popular song appears,
and it is called _My Rosary_ or _The End of a Perfect Day_, and it is
unbearable. Because here you have a pretentiousness, a base desire
to be above the crowd and yet to please (it is called “uplift,” but
it does not mean exalt) the crowd; here is the touch of “art” which
makes all things false and vulgar. To be sure, these songs, too, are
popular; the desire for culture is as universal as it is depressing.
And these are the only popular songs which are really vulgar. I will
ask no one to compare them with the real thing. Compare them with
false, trivial, ridiculous imitations of the real thing--it exists in
some of the occasional songs which composers are always trying and
which hardly ever come off. I recall a song written about the Iroquois
fire; another about Harry K. Thaw (“Just because he’s a millionaire,
Everybody’s willing to treat him unfair”). Only the two songs about
Caruso succeeded, and there never was a good one about Roosevelt. Here
is one written for Jackie Coogan in _Oliver Twist_:
When the troubles came so fast you kept on smiling,
Like a sunbeam ’mid the clouds up in the sky;
Though the rest were deep in crime
You stayed spotless all the time
Though they flayed you
Till they made you
Weep and cry.
When your little heart was aching for a mother’s tender love,
Then the Lord looked down and heard you and blessed you from above.
Though they tried to make you bad
You stayed good, dear little lad.
Would God I could
Be half as good
As you
_Oliver Twist_.
The music is just like that, too. Lower than this--much lower, at
least--the popular song never dropped. These songs _never_ become
actually, universally popular because the general taste is too high.
And I cheerfully set the lowest example beside _A Perfect Day_ for
comparison. One type is not obnoxious and the other is; one is common,
the other vulgar; one is strong and foolish, the other silly and weak.
The case for the popular song may as well rest in the solution of this
dilemma as anywhere.
_Toujours Jazz_
TOUJOURS JAZZ
The word jazz is already so complicated that it ought not to be
subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so familiar
that it is useless to read new meanings into it. Jazz is a type of
music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in essence; it is also
a method of production and as such an orchestral development; and
finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in
the spirit of the time--as far as America is concerned it is actually
our characteristic expression. This is recognized by Europeans; with
a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French, who cannot,
however, play it.
The fact that jazz is our current mode of expression, has reference
to our time and the way we think and talk, is interesting; but if
jazz music weren’t itself good the subject would be more suitable
for a sociologist than for an admirer of the gay arts. Fortunately,
the music and the way it is played are both of great interest, both
have qualities which cannot be despised; and the cry that jazz is the
enthusiastic disorganization of music is as extravagant as the prophecy
that if we do not stop “jazzing” we will go down, as a nation, into
ruin. I am quite ready to uphold the contrary. If--before we have
produced something better--we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing
nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in
our lives. Jazz, for us, isn’t a last feverish excitement, a spasm of
energy before death. It is the normal development of our resources,
the expected, and wonderful, arrival of America at a point of creative
intensity.
Jazz is good--at least good jazz is good--and I propose to summarize
some of the known reasons for holding it so. The summary will take me
far from the thing one hears and dances to, from the thing itself. The
analysis of jazz, musically or emotionally, is not likely to be done
in the spirit of jazz itself. There isn’t room on the printed page for
a glissando on the trombone, for the sweet sentimental wail of the
saxophone, or the sudden irruptions of the battery. Nor is there need
for these--intellectually below the belt--attacks. The reason jazz is
worth writing about is that it is worth listening to. I have heard it
said by those who have suffered much that it is about the only native
music worth listening to in America.
Strictly speaking, jazz music is a new development--something of the
last two years, arriving long after jazz had begun to be played. I
mean that ragtime is now so specifically written for the jazz band
that it is acquiring new characteristics. Zez Confrey, Irving Berlin,
Fred Fisher, and Walter Donaldson, among others, are creating their
work as jazz; the accent in each bar, for example, is marked in the
text--the classic idea of the slight accent on the first note of each
bar went out when ragtime came in; then ragtime created its own classic
notion,--the propulsion of the accent from the first (strong) note to
the second (weak). In jazz ragtime the accent can occur anywhere in the
bar and is attractively unpredictable. Rhythmically--essentially--jazz
is ragtime, since it is based on syncopation, and even without jazz
orchestration we should have had the full employment of precise and
continuous syncopation which we find in jazz now, in _Pack Up Your
Sins_, for example. It is syncopation, too, which has so liberated jazz
from normal polyphony, from perfect chords, that M Darius Milhaud is
led to expect from jazz a full use of polytonic and atonic harmonies;
he notes that in _Kitten on the Keys_ there exists already a chord of
the perfect major and the perfect minor. The reason why syncopation
lies behind all this is that it is fundamentally an anticipation or
a suspension in one instrument (or in the bass) of what is going to
happen in another (the treble); and the moment in which a note occurs
prematurely or in retard is, frequently, a moment of discord on the
strong beat. A dissonance sets in which may or may not be resolved
later. The regular use of syncopation, therefore, destroyed the fallacy
(as I hold it) of the perfect ear; and this is one reason why Americans
are often readier to listen to modern music than peoples who haven’t
got used to dissonance in their folk and popular music.
It is not only syncopation that makes us indebted to negro music.
Another element is the typical chord structure found there, the
characteristic variations from the accustomed. Technically described,
one of the most familiar is the subdominant seventh chord with
the interval of a minor instead of a major seventh--a method of
lowering the leading tone which affects so distant a piece as _A
Stairway to Paradise_, where the accented syllable of Par´-adise is
skilfully lowered. (By extension ragtime also uses the “diminished
third.”) The succession of dominant sevenths and of ninths is another
characteristic, and the intrusion of tones which lie outside of our
normal piano scale is common.[8] Still another attack on the perfect
chord comes from the use of the instruments of the jazz band, one
for which ragtime had well prepared us. The notorious slide of the
trombone, now repeated in the slide of the voice, means inevitably that
in its progress to the note which will make an harmonious chord, the
instrument passes through discords. “Smears,” as they are refreshingly
called, are the deadliest enemy of the classic tradition, for the
ear becomes so accustomed to discords in transition that it ceases
to mind them. (We hear them, of course; the pedants are wrong to say
that we will cease to appreciate the “real value” of a discord if
we aren’t pained by it and don’t leave the hall when one is played
without resolution.) In contemporary ragtime, it should be noted,
the syncopation of the tonality--playing your b-flat in the bass just
before it occurs in the voice, let us say--is often purely a method of
warning, an indication of the direction the melody is to take.
I put the strange harmonies of jazz first, not because they are its
chief characteristic, but because of the prejudice against them.
The suggestion is current that they are sounds which ought never to
be uttered; and with this goes an attack on the trick instruments,
the motor-horns, of the battery-man. The two things have nothing in
common. The instruments of the jazz band are wholly legitimate and its
characteristic instrument was invented by a German, after whom it is
named, in the middle of the last century, and has been used in serious
music by (and since) Meyerbeer--I refer to the saxophone. There is no
more legal objection to the muted trombone than to the violin _con
sordino_. And the opponents of jazz bands will do well to remember that
the pure and lovely D-minor symphony of César Franck was thrown out as
a symphony because it used the English horn. The actual sounds produced
by the jazz band are entirely legitimate. We have yet to see what use
they make of them.
* * * * *
In Krehbiel’s book the whole question of rhythm is comparatively taken
for granted, as it should be. Syncopation discovered in classic music,
in the Scot’s snap of the Strathspey reel, in Hungarian folk music,
is characteristic of three-fifths of the negro songs which Krehbiel
analyzed (exactly the same proportion, by the way, as are in the
interval of the ordinary _major_). But it is such a normal phenomenon
that I have never found a composer to be interested in it. Krehbiel, to
be sure, does refer to the “degenerate form” of syncopation which is
the basis of our ragtime, and that is hopeful because it indicates that
ragtime is a development--intensification, sophistication--of something
normal in musical expression. The free use of syncopation has led our
good composers of ragtime and jazz to discoveries in rhythm and to a
mastery of complications which one finds elsewhere only in the great
composers of serious music. In describing the Dahoman war dances at the
Chicago World’s Fair, Krehbiel says:
“Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers produced
nothing to compare _in artistic interest_ with the harmonious drumming
of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combination of double
and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the latter by the
drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of
detail achieved by the drummers by means of exchange of the rhythms,
syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic devices.”
The italics are mine. I am fully aware of the difference between savage
and sophisticated, between folk music and popular music; yet I cannot
help believing that this entire statement, including the Berlioz whom
I greatly admire, could be applied to Paul Whiteman playing _Pack Up
Your Sins_ or his incredible mingling of _A Stairway to Paradise_ with
a sort of _Beale Street Blues_.
Freedom with rhythm is audible--should I say palpable?--everywhere.
_Stumbling_ (Zez Confrey) is in effect a waltz played against a more
rapid counter-rhythm, and is interesting also for its fixed groups of
uneven notes--triplets with the first note held or omitted for a time,
and then with the third note omitted. A similar effect with other
means occurs in the treatment of three notes in _Innocent Ingénue
Baby_, by George Gershwin, where the same note falls under a different
beat with a delightful sense of surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker’s
words are equally tricky, for it isn’t “Innocent-Ingénue-Baby” at
all; it is Innocent Ingénue (_baby_). In _By and By_ Gershwin has
shifted an accent from the first to the second simply by giving the
second the time-value usually given to the first, a fresh, delightful
treatment of a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly
interesting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer
for jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped
syncopating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase “shake
and shimmy everywhere” in _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_,
he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full
unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they are
issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of Claude
Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concurrent, apparently
irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and eventually exciting.
They are specifically piano pieces and require a brilliant proficiency
to render them.
It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine
what part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra.
You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the
composer’s, and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity.
All you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever
instrument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer has
given. Harmonization is often, and orchestration nearly always, left to
other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit to his chief
collaborator, and he deserves it.[9]
* * * * *
Mr Berlin’s masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in jazz are
_Everybody Step_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_. I have written so much about
him in connexion with song and shows that I can say little more. I
see no letting down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is,
oddly, one of the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his
capacity is to play the more sentimental songs (_I’m Gonna Pin My Medal
on the Girl I Left Behind_, _Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone_,
_All by Myself_) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing way they
hold together in each tempo, the way in which the sentiment, the flow
of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then the rhythm, the
beat takes first place in the fast time, is exceptional. You cannot do
the same with his own _Some Sunny Day_, nor with _Chicago_ or _Carolina
in the Morning_. Berlin’s work is musically interesting, and that means
it has a chance to survive. I have no such confidence in _Dardanella_
or _Chicago_. The famous unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as
in _Pack Up Your Sins_ (the source is the same, but we need not go
into that); the working out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher’s work is
sledge hammer in comparison with Berlin’s, and lacks Berlin’s humour.
Of that quality Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson
wrote Al Jolson’s _Mammy_ (I can’t remember which, but I’m afraid
I didn’t like it), and a song I count heavily on: _Carolina in the
Morning_. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz
is improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant
primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being
held to a definite end-rhyme give us “strolling with your girlie when
the dew is pearly early in the morning.”[10] The music is clean, rapid,
and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost to
the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases until
the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief on the
long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same thing in _Kitten
on the Keys_ where one bar is repeated five times with successive
tightening of interest.
[Illustration:
GEORGE GERSHWIN
]
Two composers are possible successors to Berlin if he ever chooses
to stop. I omit Jerome Kern--a consideration of musical style will
indicate why. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of Cole
Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make me
distrust my estimate of his music. Gershwin is in Berlin’s tradition;
he has almost all the older man’s qualities as a composer (not as a
lyrics writer; nor has he Berlin’s sense of a song on the stage).
That is to say, Gershwin is capable of everything, from _Swanee_ to
_A Stairway to Paradise_. His sentiment is gentler than Berlin’s, his
“attack” more delicate. Delicacy, even dreaminess, is a quality he
alone brings into jazz music. And his sense of variation in rhythm,
of an oddly placed accent, of emphasis and colour, is impeccable.
He isn’t of the stage, yet, so he lacks Berlin’s occasional bright
hardness; he never has Berlin’s smartness; and with a greater musical
knowledge he seems possessed of an insatiable interest and curiosity.
I feel I can bank on him. Banking on Porter is dangerous because
essentially he is much more sophisticated in general attitude of mind
than any of the others, and although he has written ragtime and patter
songs and jazz of exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may
bar him forever from the highest place--I mean that he is essentially a
parodist. I know of no one else with such a sense for musical styles.
A blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a mother
song--he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical
nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of
parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to
him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity is
so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of parody
diminishes. Yet _The Blue Boy Blues_, almost as intricate a thing as
Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running syncopated
comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very excess of its skill.
Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possible that it will
divide and follow two strains--the negro and the intellectual. In the
second case Porter will be one of its leaders and Whiteman will be his
orchestra. The song _Soon_, for example, is a deliberate annihilation
of the Southern negro sentiment carefully done by playing Harlem jazz,
with a Harlem theme, mercilessly burlesquing the _clichés_ of the
Southern song--the Swanee-Mammy element--in favour of a Harlem alley.
Porter’s parody is almost too facile; _Soon_ is an exasperatingly
good piece of jazz in itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the
fact that in 1923 others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me
wonder whether his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not
be pointing a way which steadier and essentially more _native_ jazz
writers will presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more
seriously. Whether any of them could compose such a ballet as Porter
did for the Ballet Suédois is another question.
The other way is still open--the way of Sissle and Blake, of Creamer
and Layton, of A. Harrington Gibbs. The last is a name unknown to me
ten days before the moment of writing; I do not know if it represents
a Southern negro or a Welshman. But--if he has composed anything, if
_Runnin’ Wild_ isn’t a direct transcript of a negro devil-tune--he is
in the school of the negro composers and he has accomplished wonders
already. For _Runnin’ Wild_ is a masterpiece in its _genre_. Note
the cleverness of the execution: the melody is virtually without
accompaniment; it consists of groups of three notes, the interval of
time being simple, and the interval of pitch in the group or between
two successive groups, is quite conventional. Once three groups of
three notes are played in succession; toward the end the group is twice
lengthened to four notes; the orchestra is heard after each group has
been sung, giving an unnerving effect of alternating sound and silence.
But there is something more: There is the complete evocation of the
two negro spirits--the darky (South, slave) and the buck (Harlem);
the negro and the nigger. It ends with a shout which is lyrical and
ecstatic at once, wild and free. It is an enchantingly gay piece, it
expresses its title--one sees our own Gilda Grey stepping out in it
bravely; it is, in a way, a summary of the feeling of negro music which
_Shuffle Along_ and its followers restored to prominence.
More must be said of the negro side of jazz than I can say here. Its
technical interest hasn’t yet been discussed by anyone sufficiently
expert and sufficiently enthusiastic at the same time. In words and
music the negro side expresses something which underlies a great deal
of America--our independence, our carelessness, our frankness, and
gaiety. In each of these the negro is more intense than we are, and we
surpass him when we combine a more varied and more intelligent life
with his instinctive qualities. _Aggravatin’ Papa_ (don’t you try
to two-time me) isn’t exactly the American response to a suspected
infidelity, yet it is humanly sound, and is only a little more simple
and savage than we are. The superb _I’m Just Wild about Harry_ is,
actually, closer to the American feeling of 1922 than “I Always dream
of Bill”; as expression it is more honest than, say, _Beautiful Garden
of Roses_; and _He May be Your Man_ is simply a letting down of our
reticences, a frankness beyond us.
I shift between the two teams, Sissle and Blake, Creamer and Layton,
uncertain which has most to give. Sissle and Blake wrote _Shuffle
Along_; the others accomplished the intricate, puzzling rhythm of
_Sweet Angelina_, one or two other songs in _Strut Miss Lizzie_, and
_Come Along, I’m through with Worrying_. Of this song a special word
can be said. It is based on _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, and imposes on
that melody a negro theme (the shiftlessness and assurance of “bound
to live until I die”) and a musical structure similar to that applied
to the same original by Anton Dvořak in the _New World Symphony_. I
am only a moderate admirer of this work; I am not trying to put _Come
Along_ into the same category, for its value is wholly independent of
its comparative merits; nor am I claiming that jazz is equal to or
greater or less than symphonic music. But I do feel that the treatment
of a negro melody, by negroes, to make a popular and beautiful song for
Americans ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also
that our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the
ragtime composers have done, that (like Lady Bracknell) they ought to
be exposed to comment on the platform.
If they cannot hear the almost unearthly cry of the _Beale Street
Blues_ I can only be sorry for them; the whole of Handy’s work is
melodically of the greatest interest and is to me so versatile, so
changing, in quality, that I am incapable of suggesting its elements.
Observed in the works of others, the blues retain some of this elusive
nature--they are equivocal between simplicity, sadness, irony, and
something approaching frenzy. The original negro spiritual has had
more respect, but the elements have been sparsely used, and one
fancies that even in looking at these our serious composers have
felt the presence of a regrettable vulgarity in syncopation and in
melodic line. _Jesus Heal’ de Sick_ is negro from the Bahamas; its
syncopation, its cry, “Bow low!” are repeated in any number of others;
the spirituals themselves were often made out of the common songs in
which common feeling rose to intense and poetic expression--as in
_Round About de Mountain_, a funeral song with the Resurrection in a
magnificent phrase, “An she’ll rise in His arms.” The only place we
have these things left, whether you call the present version debased
or sophisticated, gain or loss, is in ragtime, in jazz. I do _not_
think that the negro (in African plastic or in American rag) is our
salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives would
be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.
I say the negro is not our salvation because with all my feeling
for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to
our set of conventions about emotional decency, I am on the side of
civilization. To anyone who inherits several thousand centuries of
civilization, none of the things the negro offers can matter unless
they are apprehended by the mind as well as by the body and the spirit.
The beat of the tom-tom affects the feet and the pulse, I am sure; in
_Emperor Jones_ the throbbing of the drum affected our minds and our
sensibilities at once. There will always exist wayward, instinctive,
and primitive geniuses who will affect us directly, without the
interposition of the intellect; but if the process of civilization
continues (will it? I am not so sure, nor entirely convinced that
it should) the greatest art is likely to be that in which an
uncorrupted sensibility is _worked_ by a creative intelligence. So
far in their music the negroes have given their response to the world
with an exceptional naïveté, a directness of expression which has
interested _our_ minds as well as touched our emotions; they have
shown comparatively little evidence of the functioning of _their_
intelligence. _Runnin’ Wild_, whether it be transposed or transcribed,
is singularly instinctive, and instinctively one recognizes it and
makes it the musical motif of a gay night. But one falls back on
_Pack Up Your Sins_ and _Soon_ as more interesting pieces of music
even if one can whistle only the first two bars. (I pass the question
of falling farther back, to the music of high seriousness, which is
another matter; it is quite possible, however, that the _Sacre du
Printemps_ of Strawinsky, to choose an example not unaffected by the
jazz age, will outlive the marble monument of the Music Box.)
* * * * *
Nowhere is the failure of the negro to exploit his gifts more obvious
than in the use he has made of the jazz orchestra; for although nearly
every negro jazz band is better than nearly every white band, no negro
band has yet come up to the level of the best white ones, and the
leader of the best of all, by a little joke, is called Whiteman. The
negro’s instinctive feeling for colourful instruments in the band is
marked; he was probably the one to see what could be done with the
equivocal voice of the saxophone--a reed in brass, partaking of the
qualities of two choirs in the orchestra at once. He saw that it could
imitate the voice, and in the person of Miss Florence Mills saw that
the voice could equally imitate the saxophone. The shakes, thrills,
vibratos, smears, and slides are natural to him, although they produce
tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a
feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a
great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a
melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent,
because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out
right in the end. But this is only the beginning of the jazz band--for
its perfection we go afield.
We go farther than Ted Lewis, whom Mr Walter Haviland calls a genius.
M Darius Milhaud has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick
in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things
have happened. The best of the negro bands (although he is dead, I make
exception for that superb 369th Hell-fighters Infantry Band as it was
conducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neighborhood
of 140th street and Lenox avenue in New York and in the negro district
of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New York have good jazz
bands; I limit myself to three which are representative, and, by their
frequent appearances in vaudeville, are familiar. Ted Lewis is one of
the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others. There is
a popular band led by Barney Bernie (as I recall the name, perhaps
incorrectly) which is an imitation Ted Lewis, and not a good one. Lewis
must be prepared for imitators, for he does with notorious success
something that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but
brilliantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is doing what he
cannot do--_i.e._, trying to make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good
band; like Europe’s, it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the
orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and
his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties,
jokes, puns, and games. I quote a eulogy by Mr Haviland:[11]
For instance, there is his travesty of the marriage ceremony.
To the jazzed tune of the good old classic “Wedding March”
Lewis puts a snowy, flower-decked bridal veil on the sleek,
pomaded head of the trombone player. He puts it on crooked,
with a scornful flip of his slender, malicious hands. Then
he leads forward the hardest-looking saxophone player, and
pretends to marry “Ham” and “Eggs”--and incidentally draws
the correct conclusion as to marriage as it exists in America
to-day. Perfect satire in less than three minutes.
Well, this is extraordinarily tedious and would be hissed off the
stage if it were not for the actual skill Lewis has in effecting
amusing orchestra combinations. His own violence, his exaggeration
of the temperamental conductor, his nasal voice and lean figure in
excessively odd black clothes, his pontificating over the orchestra,
his announcement that he is going to murder music--all indicate a lack
of appreciation of the medium. He may be a good vaudeville stunt, but
he is not a great jazz leader. Again Mr Haviland:
It is not music. It has the form of music, but he has
filled it with energy instead of spirituality. What is the
difference? You’ll understand if you hear his jazz band. It
interprets the American life of to-day; its hard surface, its
scorn of tradition, its repudiation of form, its astonishing
sophistication--and most important, its mechanical, rather
than spiritual civilization.
And again no. Lewis may have a perfectly trained orchestra, but the
_sense_ of control which one absolutely requires he does not give.
He has violence, not energy, and he cannot interpret those qualities
which Mr Haviland so justly discovers as being of our contemporary life
because he isn’t hard and scornful and sophisticated himself--he is
merely callous to some beauties and afraid of others, and by dint of
being in revolt against a serene and classic beauty pays it unconscious
tribute. (I fear also that Lewis imagines the “Wedding March” classic
in more senses than one.) It may be noted also that the tone of
travesty is not correct for contemporary America; we require neither
that nor irony. Parody, rising to satire, is our indicated medium--Mr
Dooley, not _Ulysses_.
The orchestra of Vincent Lopez I take as an example of the good,
workmanlike, competent, inventive, adequate band. It plays at the
Hotel Pennsylvania and in vaudeville, and although Lopez lacks the
ingenuity of Lewis in sound, he has a greater sense of the capacities
of jazz, and instead of doing a jazz wedding he takes the entire score
of “that infernal nonsense, _Pinafore_,” cuts it to five characteristic
fragments, and jazzes it--shall I say mercilessly or reverently?
Because he likes Sullivan and he likes jazz. And the inevitable
occurs; _Pinafore_ is good and stands the treatment; jazz is good and
loses nothing by this odd application. The orchestra has verve and, not
being dominated by an excessive personality, has humour and character
of its own. I trust these moderate words will not conceal a vast
admiration.
Jim Europe seemed to have a constructive intelligence and, had he
lived, I am sure he would have been an even greater conductor than
Whiteman. To-day I know of no second to Whiteman in the complete
exploitation of jazz. It is a real perfection of the instrument, a
mechanically perfect organization which pays for its perfection by
losing much of the element of surprise; little is left to hazard and
there are no accidents. Whiteman has been clever enough to preserve the
sense of impromptu and his principal band--that of the Palais Royal in
New York--is so much under control (his and its own) that it can make
the slightest variation count for more than all the running away from
the beat which is common _chez_ Lewis. Like Karl Muck and Jim Europe,
Whiteman is a bit of a _kapellmeister_; his beat is regular or entirely
absent; he never plays the music with his hand, or designs the contours
of a melody, or otherwise _acts_. I know that people miss these things;
I would miss them gladly a thousand times for what Whiteman gives in
return. I mean that a sudden bellow or a groan or an improvised cluck
is all very well; but the real surprise is constructive, the real
thrill is in such a moment as the middle of Whiteman’s performance of
_A Stairway to Paradise_ when a genuine Blues occurs. That is real
intelligence and the rest--is nowhere. The sleek, dull, rather portly
figure stands before his orchestra, sidewise, almost somnolent, and
listens. A look of the eye, a twitch of the knee, are his semaphoric
signals. Occasionally he picks up a violin and plays a few bars; but
the work has been done before and he is there only to know that the
results are perfect. And all the time the band is producing music with
fervour and accuracy, hard and sensitive at once. All the free, the
instinctive, the wild in negro jazz which could be integrated into his
music, he has kept; he has added to it, has worked his material, until
it runs sweetly in his dynamo, without grinding or scraping. It becomes
the machine which conceals machinery. He has arrived at one high point
of jazz--the highest until new material in the music is provided for
him.
* * * * *
The title of this essay is provoked by that of the best and bitterest
attack launched against the ragtime age--Clive Bell’s _Plus de Jazz_.
(In _Since Cézanne_.) “No more jazz,” said Mr Bell in 1921, and, “Jazz
is dying.” Recalling that Mr Bell is at some pains to dissociate from
the movement the greatest of living painters, Picasso; that he concedes
to it a great composer, Strawinsky, and T. S. Eliot, whom he calls
“about the best of our living poets,” James Joyce whom he wofully
underestimates, Virginia Woolf, Cendrars, Picabia, Cocteau, and the
musicians of _les six_,--remembering the degree of discrimination and
justice which these concessions require, I quote some of the more
bitter things about jazz because it would be shirking not to indicate
where the answer may lie:
Appropriately it (the jazz movement) took its name from
music--the art that is always behind the times.... Impudence
is its essence--impudence in quite natural and legitimate
revolt against nobility and beauty: impudence which finds its
technical equivalent in syncopation: impudence which rags....
After impudence comes the determination to surprise: you shall
not be gradually moved to the depths, you shall be given such a
start as makes you jigger all over....
... Its fears and dislikes--for instance, its horror of the
noble and the beautiful are childish; and so is its way of
expressing them. Not by irony and sarcasm, but by jeers and
grimaces, does Jazz mark its antipathies. Irony and wit are
for the grown-ups. Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes
nobility and beauty. They are the products of the cultivated
intellect and jazz cannot away with intellect or culture....
Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled
out....
... And, of course, it was delightful for those who sat
drinking their cocktails and listening to nigger bands, to be
told that, besides being the jolliest people on earth, they
were the most sensitive and critically gifted. They ... were
the possessors of natural, uncorrupted taste.... Their instinct
might be trusted: so, no more classical concerts and music
lessons....
The encouragement given to fatuous ignorance to swell with
admiration of its own incompetence is perhaps what has turned
most violently so many intelligent and sensitive people against
Jazz. They see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and
vulgar to fancy that they can understand art, and hundreds of
the conceited to imagine that they can create it....
It is understood that Mr Bell is discussing the whole of the jazz
movement, not ragtime music alone. I do not wish to go into the other
arts, except to say that if he is jazz, then Mr Joyce’s sense of form,
his tremendous intellectual grasp of his æsthetic problem, and his
solution of that problem, are far more proof than is required of the
case for jazz. Similarly for Mr Eliot. It is not exactly horror of
the noble that underlies Mr Joyce’s travesty of English prose style,
nor is it to Mr Eliot that the reproach about irony and wit is to be
made. In music it is of course not impudence, but emphasis (distortion
or transposition of emphasis) which finds its technical equivalent in
syncopation, for syncopation is a method of rendering an emotion, not
an emotion in itself. (Listen to Strawinsky.) Surprise, yes; but in
the jazz of Lewis and not in that of Whiteman, which does not jeer or
grimace, which has wit and structure--_i.e._, employs the intellect.
Nobility--no. But under what compulsion are we always to be noble? The
cocktail drinkers may have been told a lot of nonsense about their
position as arbiters of the arts; precisely the same nonsense is taught
in our schools and preached by belated æsthetes to people whose claims
are not a whit better--since it doesn’t matter what their admirers
think of themselves--it is what jazz and Rostand and Michelangelo are
in themselves that matters. I have used the word art throughout this
book in connexion with jazz and jazzy things; if anyone imagines that
the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the
dignity of Leonardo or Shakespeare, I am sorry. I do not think I have
given encouragement to “fatuous ignorance” by praising simple and
unpretentious things at the expense of the fake and the _faux bon_.
I have suggested that people do what they please about the gay arts,
about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying
whether it is noble or not, or good form or intellectually right. I
am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it
will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing--something,
anything--without _arrière-pensée_, because they will know what the
pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art. Here
is Mr Bell’s conclusion, with most of which I agree:
Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual
effort. One thing is not as good as another; so artists
and amateurs must learn to choose. No easy matter, that:
discrimination of this sort being something altogether
different from telling a Manhattan from a Martini. To select as
an artist or discriminate as a critic are needed feeling and
intellect and--most distressing of all--study. However, unless
I mistake, the effort will be made. The age of easy acceptance
of the first thing that comes is closing. Thought rather than
spirits is required, quality rather than colour, knowledge
rather than irreticence, intellect rather than singularity,
wit rather than romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity
rather than impudence, and lucidity above all things: _plus de
Jazz_.
It is not so written, but it sounds like “Above all things, no more
jazz!” A critic who would have hated jazz as bitterly as Mr Bell does,
wrote once, alluding to a painter of the second rank:
But, beside those great men, there is a certain number of
artists who have a distinct faculty of their own, by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we
cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in
general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who
have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just
because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority.
--and beside the great arts there is a certain number of lesser arts
which have also a pleasure to give; and if we savour it strongly and
honestly we shall lose none of our delight in the others. But if we
fear and hate _them_, how shall we go into the Presence?
_Mr Dooley,
Meet Mr Lardner_
MR DOOLEY, MEET MR LARDNER
One of the most illuminating things Van Wyck Brooks ever said, about
himself, was that Mr Dooley is already forgotten. It was particularly
illuminating because Mr Brooks was in England when he made that
statement, and it was some time before 1914--and it happens that it was
in England, in 1917 that I was made to understand how living Mr Dooley
is, how relevant to affairs and situations of the moment, and how much
English men and women consider him as one of the better items in the
heritage of Americans. The writer of _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ is an
invaluable critic for America; yet one wishes that he, too, could see
Mr Dooley’s place in our literature; one still hopes that he will begin
to enjoy Ring Lardner.
The juxtaposition of these two names would be reasonable even if both
of them did not write in slang, for one is the greatest of our retired
satirists and the other has every chance (if not every intention) of
becoming the greatest of our active ones. I should like to say at once
that I am not addressing an open letter to Dear Mr Lardner, bidding
him, while there is yet time, to think on higher things. I do not want
him to forswear for a moment his hold on the popular imagination, nor
to write for a more judicious _clientèle_. I am satisfied to have Mr
Lardner amuse me; if the strain of satire in him is an accident and he
prefers to go on with his slang humour--I can always read Mr Dooley or
Dean Swift. But if the growing vein of satire in all of Lardner’s work
is what I think it is, he has much to learn from Mr Dooley. I shall
presently come to Mr Dooley and indicate what it is Lardner can learn
in those beautiful pages; the main thing is that he is probably the
only man in America with the capacity of learning the lesson of the
master, and happily he can learn it without ceasing for a moment to
live in his own world. I do not wish to force upon him the ordeal of
being worried about.
There may have been a time when Mr Lardner gave cause for worry.
Perhaps when _You Know Me, Al_ had run as long as it needed to run,
one might have feared that Mr Lardner, having discovered the American
language as his medium, simply didn’t know what to do with it. If his
humour was going to depend for ever on “1-sided” and “4-taste” and odd
misspellings, it might cease to be funny. It was necessary, in short,
that Mr Lardner should have something personal to say. He has answered
the question of his future by showing the beginnings of a first-rate
satirist, continuing the tradition of Mark Twain and Mr Dooley. And
having these tentatives in mind we can begin to look back and wonder
whether he wasn’t always something of a satirist, unconsciously.
The dates may confound my argument, so I will omit them; substantially
Lardner began writing the letters of a busher just when the more
serious magazines were exploiting the intellectual idea of “inside
baseball.” Those were the days--and they must have been funny, we feel
_circa_ 1923 when the bought and sold world’s series and the letters
of the fishing pitcher and suchlike scandal are in our memories,
carefully tucked away because the honour of the national game is safe
in the hands of a dictator--those were the days when the manager
of a baseball team was regarded as a combination of a captain of
finance (later events rather justified that assumption) a Freud, and
an unborn Einstein. A fine body of college graduates, clean-living,
sport-loving, well-read boys were the players; and a sport-loving,
game-for-the-game’s sake body of men the enthusiasts. Hughie Fullerton
and Paul Elmer More might be seen any day in the same column, and
John J. McGraw, who allowed himself to be called Muggsy to show what
a good democrat he was, lunched daily at the President’s table. Into
this pretentious parade Mr Lardner injected the busher--and baseball
has never recovered. The busher was simply a roughneck and a fool, a
braggart and a liar; he was on occasions a good ball player, and he
seemed to be inflated with the hot air which had been written about
him. He pricked the bubble, and I do not wonder that Heywood Broun,
despairing of making interesting his accounts of a recent world’s
series, publicly prayed to God to change places with him for duration.
Nothing short of divine power could save them.
It is a long time since the days of the busher and when Lardner
returned to baseball it was clear that the subject interested him in no
degree, and that he had changed much as a writer. It is not necessary
to belittle the earlier work; only to note that in 1922 the Lardner
touch was much more deft, that the language was both richer and more
accurate, and that he was continually writing parodies, sometimes of a
phrase, often of a whole style. Three or four of the reports he wrote
for the New York _American_ were jewels--and, although they had little
to do with baseball, they must have been written in the few hours which
intervene between the end of a game and the moment of going to press.
The whole series of articles ought to be reprinted; I am limited to
snatches from two of them. The first set the theme: that Lardner had
promised his wife a fur coat from his winnings--he had bet on the
Yankees. The headline was
Rings’ Mrs.
_Outa Luck_
On Fur Coat
and then followed:
Well friends you can imagine my surprise and horror when I
found out to-night that the impression had got around some way
another that as soon as this serious was over I was planning
to buy a expensive fur coat for my Mrs. and put a lot of money
into same and buy a coat that would probably run up into
hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Well I did not mean to give no such kind of a impression and
I certainly hope that my little article was not read that way
by everybody a specially around my little home because in the
first place I am not a sucker enough to invest hundreds and
hundreds of dollars in a garment which the chances are that
the Mrs. will not wear it more than a couple times all winter,
as the way it looks now we are libel to have the most openest
winter in history, and if women folks should walk along the st.
in expensive fur coats in the kind of weather which it looks
like we are going to have, why, they would only be laughed at
and any way I believe a couple can have a whole lot better time
in winter staying home and reading a good book or maybe have a
few friends in to play bridge.
Further and more, I met a man at supper last night that has
been in the fur business all his life and ain’t did nothing you
might say only deal in furs and this man says that they are a
great many furs in this world which is reasonable priced that
has got as much warmth in them as high price furs and looks a
great deal better.
For inst. he says that a man is a sucker to invest thousands
and thousands of dollars in expensive furs like Erminie,
mule-skin, squirrel skin and Kerensky when for a hundred
dollars, or not even that much, why a man can buy a owl skin or
horse skin or weasel skin garment that looks like big dough and
practically prostrates people with the heat when they wear them.
So I hope my readers will put a quietus on the silly rumour
that I am planning to plunge in the fur market. I will see
that my Mrs. is dressed in as warm a style as she has been
accustomed to but neither her or I is the kind that likes to
make a big show and go up and down Fifth ave. sweltering in a
$700 hog-skin garment in order so as people will turn around
and gap at us. Live and let live is my slocum.
If this were not funny its secondary qualities would not be worth
noting. The single sentence which makes up the second paragraph is a
miracle of condensation, for it contains the whole mind and character
of the individual created behind it (it is not Ring Lardner, obviously)
and at the same time it is a miracle of the ear, for the rhythm and
intonation of the American spoken language is perfectly caught and
held in it. What is the use of _Babbitt_ in five hundred pages if we
have Lardner in five hundred words? The fur episode was continued two
days later, the Yankees continuing to lose and three kittens--“three
members of what is sometimes referred to as the feline tribe”--out at
Mr Lardner’s “heavily mortgaged home in Great Neck ... is practically
doomed you might say ...” because Mr Lardner has met a man “who has
did nothing all his life but sell and wear fur coats” and who assured
him that catskin garments no bigger than a guest towel were all the
rage and had been seen on “some of the best-dressed women in New York
strolling up and down Tenth avenue....”
“These 3 little members of the feline tribe is the cutest and best
behaved kitties in all catdom, their conduct having always been
above reproaches outside of a tendency on the part of Ringer to bite
strangers’ knuckles. Nowhere on Long Island is there a more loveable
trio of grimalkins, and how it pierces my old heart to think that some
day next week these 3 little fellows must be shot down like a dog so as
their fur can be fashioned into a warm winter coat for she who their
antics has so often caused to screech with laughter.”
The annihilation of the whole Black Beauty-Beautiful Joe style of
writing in the last sentence is complete, and is accomplished with the
retention of Lardner’s own peculiarities. It may shock Mr Lardner to
know that he has done in little what Mr Joyce has done on the grand
scale in _Ulysses_.
Indeed I feel that there must be hidden parody in the earlier writings
of Mr Lardner, too, because he is so clean in handling it now. Satire
in detail he had--there is a dictionary of it in his one word “he-ll.”
Elsewhere, in a series later than _You Know Me, Al_ he has described a
half-fatuous, half-hardheaded roughneck dragging his silly and scheming
wife and sister-in-law through the hotels and apartments of the
backwash of society, and the story grew more and more sardonic, more
and more entertaining; little of the aimless, sickly, trivial life of
the merely prosperous escaped him. Unlike Mr Dooley, his chief concerns
were private ones; it is only recently that he has touched upon public
affairs. For a long time his only “universal” was baseball--a form
of entertainment which now bores him exceedingly. He is also bored,
I gather from an interview in the New York _Globe_, with the sort of
fiction he has been writing, and amuses himself with writing plays. But
as a satirist he is turning slowly towards matters of pith, and the
question of his ultimate rank depends on this: Can he, as he broadens
out, retain the swift, destructive, and tremendously funny turn of
phrase, the hard and resistant mind, the gaiety of spirit which have
made him a humorist? Can he, in short, learn from Mr Dooley and remain
Mr Lardner? For many reasons I think he can.
Between the busher and these newspaper reports Mr Lardner has written
much; among his ephemera, even, there are many pages not to be lost. I
shall return to them after drawing a long course with Mr Dooley as my
centre, for it is one of the significant things about Mr Dooley that
you must always keep him in your eye when you are scanning the horizon
for an American satirist.
Mr Dooley was a satirist of the highest order and an excellent
humorist. The combination is interesting. Psycho-analysts may determine
at a later date that the reason he wrote in dialect was that he was
afraid to attack the American people directly; I prefer to believe that
the good sense of his creator (Finley Peter Dunne, to be sure; but
one always thinks of Martin Dooley in his independent existence) saw
that a benevolent humour was the correct medium for a satire adequate
to America. And that is America’s good fortune. Read the criticism
of American warfare and politics as developed in the satire of Mr
Dooley and compare it with the satire of French politics and warfare
as expressed in the irony of Anatole France; without measuring the
quality of the one by the other, think only that each is _adequate_
to the subject. Less than the bitterness of _Penguin Island_ and the
_Histoire contemporaine_ would not have served for France; more than
the laughter of Dooley would have been disproportionate and unmanly for
us.
Satire is like parody in admitting the integrity of the subject; it is
a pruning knife applied for the good of the tree; and irony is a dagger
with corrosive poison at the tip. Satire is proper to America because
essentially the satirist believes that life is all right, and that
only the extravagances and frailties of American life, at the moment
of writing, need correction or are subject to mockery. The Frenchman,
in a highly organized society, which he takes to be not only the best
expression of life, but life itself, turns to irony as his natural mode
when he is confronted with the ineluctable vision of its evil.
The danger is, to be sure, that our satirists remain superficial. When
the thing is done roughly, without much humour, with no rich sense of
the vastness and variety of the comic carnival, we get little more than
the eternal “wise crack”; and the wise crack is no more entertaining
in misspelled English than it is in capital letters, no more in pidgin
than in Yiddish. I do not mean that George Ade and Wallace Irwin and
Bill Nye and Montague Glass haven’t each a special quality which makes
for amusement; I do mean that they lack the great general qualities
of knowing and understanding which create humour. An illustration
will do more than any defining to make the difference clear. The
Japanese Schoolboy used to begin his letters, “To Hon. Editor” and Ring
Lardner is, I suppose, the only man in America who can begin, “Well,
friends....”
Ambrose Bierce is generally supposed to have had this quality;
certainly he had intelligence and wrote respectable English with a
cold pen. His _Dictionary_ does not impress me as the work of a spirit
naturally ironical. Ade wrote satirically a long time ago; once in
a while something occurs in the _Fables_ to justify the acclaim of
which F. P. A. is the curator. There is much more in Artemas Ward,
whose glory is kept alive, worthily, by the sardonic leader-writer
of _The Freeman_, Mr Albert Jay Nock. As language neither Ade nor
Ward approaches in interest the studies of Mark Twain in _Life on the
Mississippi_, nor those of Dooley and Lardner. The difference between
Bill Nye and Ward on one side and Montague Glass and Lardner on the
other, is that the former did not use an actually viable language or
dialect, but used distortions of English for a specific effect. (I am
far from suggesting that Ward did not use American notably, nor that
his language is the better part of his work; he was a real satirist.)
It is my guess that in the beginning the misspelled words signified
that the speaker was the hard sensible common man with none of “your”
refinements. Juvenal and Johnson may have been superior to the thing
attacked; it pleased the democratic American to pretend to be beneath
it. The literary success of the dialects is another matter, which
anyone who believes that ours is still an Anglo-Saxon country will do
well to consider. Montague Glass is particularly interesting in this
respect. He impresses me as being neither a wise nor a foolish man, but
a smart one. What gave him his vogue was his conformity with the norm
of business acuteness and his use of a highly complex private racial
idiom, which expresses a highly complex integrated almost secret racial
life; he transferred, almost transliterated it into recognizable, at
least understandable English, with such a climax as “I wish I were
dead, God forbid!” which was recognized by the populace as a part of
American life ten years before Mr Henry Ford bought the Protocols. The
racial dialect is also exploited, but not with so reliable an ear, by
Hugh Wiley in his negro stories; it is possible that the stories of
Octavus Roy Cohen are more accurate (they are not so entertaining);
but the life they represent is, in any case, too near to America to be
surprising to us.
I am convinced that nearly all of Mr Dooley and nearly all of the later
Lardner would stand without dialect. It is not an odd-looking word that
impresses most in Mr Dooley’s masterpieces about the Dreyfus case. “The
witness will confine himself to forgeries” is English as Swift would
have written it, and is neither better nor worse than, “How th’ divvle
can they perjure thimsilves if they ain’t sworn?” or
“’‘Let us proceed,’ says th’ impartial an’ fair-minded judge, ‘to
th’ thrile iv th’ haynious monsther Cap Dhry-fuss’ he says. Up jumps
Zola, an’ says he in Frinch: ‘Jackuse,’ he says, which is a hell of a
mane thing to say to anny man. An’ they thrun him out. ‘Judge’ says
th’ attorney f’r th’ difinse, ‘an’ gintlemen iv’ th’ jury’ he says.
‘Ye’re a liar,’ says th’ judge. ‘Cap, ye’re guilty, an’ ye know it,’ he
says.... ‘Let us pro-ceed to hearin’ th’ tisti-mony,’ he says.... Be
this time Zola has come back; an’ he jumps up, an’, says he, ‘Jackuse,’
he says. An’ they thrun him out.”
It is no wonder that this passage was reprinted by the New York
_Evening Post_ after the expulsion of the Socialists from Albany.
Nearly everything serious in Dooley has the same relevance, and one
reads about war experts and “disqualifying the enemy” (in relation to
the Spanish-American and Boer Wars) with a slightly dizzying sensation
that this man has said everything that needed to be said twenty years
in advance of his time. We needed him badly during the war, but a comic
song about him had somehow withdrawn his name from the rank of great
literature and we had to do with sad second-bests. There isn’t a chance
in the world that he will be forgotten, because he is recognized in
England and we shall some day reimport his reputation. For he has
the great advantage of being at the same time a humorist and a social
historian, an every-day philosopher and the _homme moyen sensuel_.
His qualities are so immediate that analyzing them appears superfluous.
He gets his effects by distortion, not by exaggeration. When he
told Mr Roosevelt to call the next edition of his book _Alone in
Cubia_ he extracted an essence from it, rather than inflated it.
His adversatives are surprising and devastating. He conceives a
Blood-is-thicker-than-Water speech in these terms (from the English to
the American): “Foolish and frivolous people, cheap but thrue-hearted
and insincere cousins.... Ye ar-re savage but inthrestin’.” Sometimes
he leaves out the “but”: “They was followed be th’ gin’rals iv th’
Fr-rinch ar-rmy, stalwart, fearless men, with coarse, disagreeable
faces.” His unexpectedness goes farther; he once said that left alone
General Shafter could have taken “Sandago” without losing an ounce.
I do not wish to write a literary essay about Mr Dooley, and having
mentioned Swift I have little to say. I must admit that the Irish of Mr
Dooley is stage-Irish; what makes it acceptable is that it is entirely
Dooley-Irish, and whatever the spelling, whatever the oddities of
words, the intonation is always right. For of course it is possible to
write a dialect without imitation of sound, and to do it effectively
and honestly. Sherwood Anderson has done it in _I Want to Know Why_ and
in _I’m a Fool_; Lardner has done it in _The Golden Honeymoon_; and
the amiable efforts of Mr John V. A. Weaver are ineffective because
in nine out of ten cases he is setting slang words, well observed and
accurately recorded, to the rhythm of literary English. Mr Dooley’s
rhythm is always that of the estimable, easy-going barkeeper who is
speaking.
One looks back with a certain envy to the time when a barkeeper could
talk about the world. Our present social situation is disjected, and
the period before the war seems incredibly calm and halcyon. It seems
to us that then America was settling into the character it had made
for itself in the Civil War, a time of consolidation and certainty.
A minor passion for social justice seems to have been the only great
force hostile to that sense of security and self-satisfaction without
which no civilization can become sophisticated and refined. It was
pre-eminently the time when a satirist could exist. Mr Dooley is the
proof that he did. He understood his America, as in his time, and
without bitterness he makes it live again.
Ten years from now, if we settle down, Mr Lardner may have another
such opportunity. For the moment he is driven to the surface; he
has no _point d’appui_ for his attack; in a bewildering and unsure
civilization, he is himself unsure. It is possible that he will become
so accustomed to shallow waters that he will never venture into deep; I
should be sorry, because he has qualities too precious to be wasted.
He is developing a strain of wild imagination, of something approaching
fantasy. And his occasional pieces of fiction are far beyond the
average of stories written in America. _The Golden Honeymoon_ (which Mr
Edward J. O’Brien had the acumen to put in his collection of the best
stories of 1922) is almost a masterpiece; it has a sort of artistic
wisdom, is without tricks, and is beautifully written. He has also
written a burlesque which failed drearily with the 49-ers and a sketch,
_The Bull Pen_, in which the busher reappeared, which was a moderate
success in the Ziegfeld Follies. This piece and _The Golden Honeymoon_
show a fresh tendency on Lardner’s part to understate; they are
actually quiet, as if he were tired of noisiness. I do not think he is
tired of anything. In an interview recently he said, “Some philosopher
once said that if you want a thing badly when you’re young you’re
likely to get too much of it before you’re old; _I hope to God he knew
what he was talking about_.” He is afraid of nothing; one fancies he
doesn’t care for too many things.
He grew weary, a little while ago, of the literary diaries published
from week to week by the highbrows, these records “of who they seen and
talked to and what they done since the last time we heard from them”
and so he wrote his own for the New York Sunday _American_. Among the
items chronicled were:
“When I got home Sousa was there and we played some Brahms and Grieg
with me at the piano and him at one end of a cornet. ‘How well you
play, Lardy,’ was Sousa’s remark. Brahms called up in the evening and
him and his wife come over and played rummy....” (This is grotesque,
but he knows his subject.) “Had breakfast with Mayor Hylan and Senator
Lodge.... Went home and played some Rubinstein on the black keys....
President Harding called up long distants to say hello. The Mrs talked
to him as I was playing with the cat.... Took a ride on the Long Island
R.R. to study human nature....” And so on. It is a little better than
verbal parody, is it not, Lardy?
Mr Lardner pretends still to feel some of the he-man’s contempt
for letters, suggesting at the same time the fat-headed pride of a
real-estate broker who has had a patriotic poem printed in the local
paper. He is, as Sherwood Anderson says, “sticking to the gang.” But he
is wise and witty and he has few compunctions about being vulgar. It is
his most precious asset. For in America the fear of vulgarity is the
beginning of deadness. Abase! (if I may quote Mr Dooley).
_A Tribute to
Florenz Ziegfeld_
A TRIBUTE TO FLORENZ ZIEGFELD
The incurable romanticist, George Jean Nathan, was the first to
speak boldly in print and establish the rule of the silver-limbed,
implacable Aphrodite in the theatre of Florenz Ziegfeld; and the
equally incurable realist, Heywood Broun, has discovered that it isn’t
so. Mr Nathan, obsessed by the idea that the world in general, and
America in particular, goes to any extreme to conceal its interest
in sex, really did a service to humanity by pointing out that there
_were_ beautiful girls in revues and that these girls constituted one
of the main reasons for the attendance of men at the performances. Mr
Broun, sensing a lack of abandon and frenzy in the modern bacchanale,
says, simply, that it isn’t so, and implies that anyone who could get
a thrill out of that--! Like the king in that story of Hans Christian
Andersen, of which Mr Broun is inordinately fond, the girls haven’t any
clothes on; and this little child, noticing the fact, is dreadfully
disappointed.
Now Mr Ziegfeld is, in the opinion of those who work for him, a genius,
and can well afford to say, “A plague on both your houses,” for he has
built up what he himself calls a national institution, glorifying, not
degrading, the American girl (_pauvre petite_). He can afford to look
with complacency upon undergraduates charging upon his theatre in the
anticipation of unholy delights, and forced to bear the clownings of
Eddie Cantor or the wise sayings of Will Rogers; then he can turn to Dr
John Roach Straton who, having heard from Mr Broun that the Follies
are chaste, approaches to see some monstrosity of a classic ballet and
hears the vast decent sensuality of a jazz number instead.
Mr Ziegfeld has lived through so much--through the period when it
was believed indecent to be undressed and through the manlier period
when nudity was contrasted with nakedness (it is the basis of a sort
of Y. M. C. A. æsthetics that the nude is always pure) and through
the long period, 1911–15, when the reviewers discovered the superior
attractiveness of the stockinged leg; art in the shape of Joseph Urban
has left a permanent mark upon him, and he has trafficked in strange
seas for numbers and devices; what was vulgar and what was delicate,
boresome and thrilling, have all passed through his hands; he has sent
genius whistling down the wind to the vaudeville stage and built up new
successes with secondary material; the storehouses are littered with
the gaudy monuments of his imitators. And all the time the secret of
his success has been staring Broadway in the face.
It is well to speak of Mr Ziegfeld’s success because in the last few
years several things have happened to the revue; for almost as long
as I remember the Ziegfeld Follies, I remember the Winter Garden
opposition, the Passing Show, its exact antithesis.[12] But lately
there have arrived at least two productions which give every guaranty
of permanence, in addition to some others which may turn out to be
equally sure of survival. I mean the Music Box Revue and the Greenwich
Village Follies. The Music Box is only in its third year; its chiefs
assets are one of the most agreeable theatres in New York, assuring a
reputation on the road, and first call on the still unsatisfied talents
of Mr Irving Berlin. The Greenwich Village Follies, even if it lose its
present director, John Murray Anderson, will continue to be successful
for one of the strangest reasons in the world--its reputation for being
“artistic.” The Winter Garden, the two Follies, and the Music Box, are
the four points of the compass in this truly magnetic field. When the
needle points due north, I usually find Mr Ziegfeld fairly snug under
the Pole Star.
There are, if you count the chorus individually, about a hundred
reasons for seeing a revue; there is only one reason for thinking
about it, and that is that at one point, and only one point, the
revue touches upon art. The revue as a production manifests the same
impatience with half measures, with boggling, with the good enough and
the nearly successful, which every great artist feels, or pretends to
feel, in regard to his own work. It shows a mania for perfection; it
aspires to be precise and definite, it corresponds to those _de luxe_
railway trains which are always exactly on time, to the millions of
spare parts that always fit, to the ease of commerce when there is a
fixed price; jazz or symphony may sound from the orchestra pit, but
underneath is the real tone of the revue, the steady, incorruptible
purr of the dynamo. And with the possible exception of architecture,
_via_ the back door of construction, the revue is the most notable
place in which this great American dislike of bungling, the real
pleasure in a thing perfectly done, apply even vaguely to the arts.
If you can bring into focus, simultaneously, a good revue and a
production of grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, the
superiority of the lesser art is striking. Like the revue, grand opera
is composed of elements drawn from many sources; like the revue,
success depends on the fusion of these elements into a new unit,
through the highest skill in production. And this sort of perfection
the Metropolitan not only never achieves--it is actually absolved in
advance from the necessity of attempting it. I am aware that it has the
highest-paid singers, the best orchestra, some of the best conductors,
dancers and stage hands, and the worst scenery in the world, in
addition to an exceptionally astute impresario; but the production of
these elements is so haphazard and clumsy that if any revue-producer
hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway. Yet
the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and complacently
permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART.
[Illustration: THE SUN’S DWELLING. By Joseph Urban]
The same thing is true in other fields--in producing serious plays, in
writing great novels, we will stand for a second-rateness we would not
for a moment abide in the construction of a bridge or the making of an
omelette, or the production of a revue. And because in a revue the bunk
doesn’t carry, the revue is one of the few places you can go with the
assurance that the thing, however tawdry in itself, will be well done.
If it is tawdry, it is so in keeping with the taste of its patrons, and
without pretense; whereas in the major arts--no matter how magnificent
the masquerade of Art may be--the taste of a production is usually
several notches below the taste of the patrons.
The good revue pleases the eye, the ear, and the pulse; the very
good revue does this _so well that it pleases the mind_. It operates
in that equivocal zone where a thing does not have to be funny--it
need only sound funny; nor be beautiful if it can for a fleeting
moment appear beautiful. It does not have to send them away laughing
or even whistling; all it needs to do is to keep the perceptions of
the audience fully engaged all the time, and the evaporation of its
pleasures will bring the audience back again and again.
The secret I have alluded to is how to create the atmosphere of
seeming--and Mr Ziegfeld knows the secret in every detail. In brief,
he makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of
production. Undoubtedly ten or fifteen other people help in this--I use
Mr Ziegfeld’s name because in the end he is responsible for the kind of
show put out in his name and because the smoothness I refer to goes far
beyond the mechanism of the stage or skill in directing a chorus. It is
not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter
where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly
integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.
Everyone with a grain of sense knows that Mr Urban can make all the
sets for a production and Mr Berlin write all the music; Mr Ziegfeld
has the added grain to see that if he’s going to have a great variety
of things and people, he had better divide his _décor_ and his music
among many different talents.
There have been funnier revues and revues more pleasing to the eye and
revues with far better popular music; nowhere have all the necessary
ingredients appeared to such a high average of advantage. Mr Anderson
could barely keep Bert Savoy within the bounds of a revue; the Music
Box collapses entirely as a revue at a few dance steps by Bobby Clark.
But Ziegfeld as early as 1910 was able to throw together Harry Watson
(Young Kid Battling Dugan, nowadays, in vaudeville), Fannie Brice,
Anna Held, Bert Williams, and Lillian Lorraine and, as if to prove that
he was none the less producing a revue, bring down his curtain on a
set-piece of “Our American Colleges.” And twelve years later, with Will
Rogers and Gilda Grey and Victor Herbert and Ring Lardner, he is still
producing a revue and brings both curtains down on his chorus--once _en
masse_ and the second time undressing for the street in silhouette.
I cannot estimate the amount of satisfaction which since those early
days Mr Ziegfeld has provided. My own memories do not go back to the
actual productions in which Anna Held figured; I recall only the
virtuous indignation of elderly people and my own mixed feelings of
curiosity and disgust when I overheard reports of the goings-on.
But from the time I begin to remember them until to-day there has
always been a peculiar quality of pleasure in the Ziegfeld shows, and
the uninterrupted supply of things pleasant to see and entertaining
to hear, has been admirable. Mr Ziegfeld has never been actually
courageous; his novelties are never more audacious than, say, radiolite
costumes or an Urban backdrop. He is apparently pledged to the tedious
set-pieces which are supposed to be artistic--the Ben Ali Haggin
effects, the Fan in Many Lands or the ballot of A Night in Statuary
Hall with the discobolus coming to life and the arms of the Venus
de Milo miraculously restored. There are years, too, in which Mr
Ziegfeld, discovering new talent, follows but one vein and leaves his
shows so much in one tone that a slight depression sets in. Mr Edmund
Wilson, in the _Dial_ repeats the plaint of Mr Heywood Broun in the
_World_--that the Follies are frigid--the girls are all straight, the
ballet becomes a drill, the very laughs are organized and mechanical.
Well, it happens to be the function of the Ziegfeld Follies to be
Apollonic, not Dionysian; the leap and the cry of the bacchanale give
way to the song and dance, and when we want the true frenzy we have to
go elsewhere. I doubt whether even the success of the negro shows will
frighten Ziegfeld into mingling with his other elements some that will
be riotous and wild; the best they can do will be to prevent Ziegfeld
from growing too utterly “refined.” He tends at this moment to quiet
fun of the Lardner type and the occasional horseplay with which he
accentuates this murmur, this smile, is usually unsuccessful. I am,
myself, more moved by broader strokes than his, but I recognize that
Ziegfeld, and not the producers of _Shuffle Along_, is in the main
current of our development--that we tend to a mechanically perfect
society in which we will either master the machine or be enslaved by
it. And the only way to master it--since we cannot escape--will be by
understanding it in every detail. That is exactly Mr Ziegfeld’s present
preoccupation. I dissent, however, from the suggestion that the
physical loveliness of the Ziegfeld chorus has ceased to be seductive.
Some, as Mr Lardner once said--some like ’em cold, and there are at
least five other choruses which affect me as pleasurably. But for
those that like the Ziegfeld-type chorus, which has always a deal of
stateliness and a haughty air of being damned well bred, Mr Ziegfeld’s
production of the wares is perfect. He has simply moved his chorus one
step backward in order to make them appear slightly inaccessible and
so a little more desirable. His attack is indirect, but it is no less
certain.
In the back of the mind there always remains the idea that a revue
ought to be a revue of something, and as far as I know, George M. Cohan
is the last of those who have tried to accomplish that. Weber and
Fields presented burlesque; Mr Cohan’s efforts are not lost in that
dim perspective, and they seem superior, for he wove his amazingly
expert parodies of current successes into a new creation, a veritable
review. The high spirits and sophistication of the Cohan revues have
not frequently been equalled on our stage, for the whole of Cohan’s
talents were poured into them without reserve. The parodies and satire
were merciless and spared not even himself; for he took the old jibe
about his Yankee-Doodleism and wrote apropos of a show of his which
had failed: “Go, get a Flag, For you need it, you need it, you know
you need it!” He took off _Common Clay_ in swift and expert patter;
he destroyed the “song hit” with _Down by the Erie_ ten years earlier
and ten times better than the Forty-niners did; he advertised himself
and ridiculed his own self-advertisement; he was the principal actor
and he played fair with Willie Collier and Charles Winninger and Louise
Dresser. Throughout he was the high point of Cohanism, of that shrewd,
cock-sure, arrogant, wise, and witty man who was the true expression of
the America of Remember the Maine!, the McKinley elections, the Yellow
Kid, and _Coon! Coon! Coon!_ He was always smart, always versatile. To
this day he is smart enough to produce _Mary_ and _Little Nelly Kelly_,
knowing that the old stuff goes biggest and that even in the midst of
his own sophistication he can capture vaster audiences with his own
simplicity. This is an abdication of his proper function, to be sure.
The man who had so much to do with the great-American-drama (I allude
to _Seven Keys to Baldpate_ and the description “great-American” is
deliberate) and who could take any trash (_A Prince There Was_) and
make it go, through the indefatigable energy and the cleverness of
his own acting, and who could fight the world with his preposterous
_Tavern_--this man had no right to give up doing what he did so well.
I care nothing for the famous nasalities of George M. Cohan; after
the Four Cohans I saw him first as actor, so I do not mourn for his
dancing days. But I know that with only a fraction of Berlin’s gifts
as a composer, he had something which even Berlin lacks: the complete
sense of the boards. His revues would have been desirable additions to
each theatrical season if they had done no more than produce himself.
His hard sense, his unimaginative but not unsympathetic response to
everything that took place on the street and at the bar and on the
stage made him a prince of reviewers--he was not without malice and
he was wholly without philosophy. Perhaps that is why his revues
were wonderfully gay. Why they ever stopped I cannot tell; when they
stopped, strangely enough, they left the field to the Winter Garden. I
make no claim that the revues at this house are always pleasing; people
apparently still exist who are enthusiasts for Valeska Surratt. But I
do claim that they are always revues, even if they are sometimes to be
weighed by avoirdupois and not by critical standard.
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
GEORGE M. COHAN. By Alfred Frueh
]
The annihilation of all the vast and silly posturing which went on
a few years ago under the name of _The Jest_ was accomplished in a
perfect burlesque by Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger (the latter
played Leo Ditrichstein in one of the Cohan revues) and if _The Sheik_
never reached the stage it is possibly because Eddie Cantor burlesqued
it in advance on a bicycle and with a time clock for the women of the
harem. What has held the Winter Garden down (except, of course, when Al
Jolson there inhabited) is the lack of good music; for the humour has
always been broad and the slap-stick merry. The shows there always seem
to be hankering a little for the additional vulgarity of out-and-out
burlesque, but the Rath Brothers were as much at home there as the
Avon Comedy Four; if my head were at stake I could not recall a single
thing there which could be called exquisite, but I swear that as the
show girls shuffled precariously up and down the runway I did at times
fancy I heard the stamping of a goatish foot behind the scenes, and if
I didn’t like the sound, I was in the minority. The Winter Garden has
always been, in part, a direct assault on the senses and the method of
art is always indirect; Mr Ziegfeld knows this and always manages to
bathe his scenes in a cool virginal light, to the intensification of
pleasure for the connoisseurs.
The difference between these two shows can be measured by watching one
figure pass across the stage of each. Last year at the Winter Garden
Conchita Piquer sang a _malagueña_. (You can discover all you need to
know about the _malagueña_ in Mr Santayana’s Soliloquies; to us it is
the perfect exotic, as strange to our ears as Chinese song--stranger
because it remains recognizably Occidental, yet seems to be based on
no intervals known to our scales, and its rhythm is capricious and
uncertain). She sang it “wildly well,” with a pert assured air of
superiority. Yet she cast flowers into the audience as she did so, and
the background and the massing of the chorus behind her were all out of
key and prevented the song from being what at the Ziegfeld Follies it
inevitably must have been, exquisite.
At the Follies passes Gilda Grey, a performer of limited talents
gifted with unutterable intensity. Against a flaring background in
which all the signs of all of Broadway are crowded together, she sings
a commentary on the negro invasion--_It’s Getting Very Dark on Old
Broadway_--the scene fades and radiolite picks out the white dresses
of the chorus, the hands and faces recede into undistinguishable
black. And while the chorus sings Miss Grey’s voice rises in a deep
and shuddering ecstasy to cry out the two words, “Getting darker!” To
disengage that cry, to insure its repercussion, went all the skill of
production in everything that preceded and in everything that followed.
It was exciting, but it was also exquisite, and that is exactly what
the Winter Garden could not have done.
Neither of the two Music Box revues has reached that height, because
in neither has production kept pace with Berlin’s music. It is part
of the technique of the revue to have “stunts” and Berlin, being
_capable du tout_, last year set a dining menu to music. Yet nothing
was added when lobster and mayonnaise and celery appeared in the flesh;
even worse, this year something precious is lost when one of Berlin’s
veritable masterpieces, _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil_, is
produced with an endless number of trapdoors and hoists and all the
other mechanics of the stage. The first of the two revues flourished on
humour--Willie Collier and Sam Bernard were inexpressibly funny--and
on Berlin’s _Say It With Music_; so long as it stayed in New York the
appearance in person of Mr Berlin, explaining to the well-remembered
tunes how he wrote each of his masterpieces of ragtime, added much.
The tone of this revue was the tone of the building itself--varying
from the cool and well-proportioned exterior to the comfortable, a
little lavish interior. Florence Moore was as outrageous as ever, and
at least as active; she is the most tireless person on the stage and to
me the most tiring, for her vitality affects me as a cyclone in which I
am quite unnecessarily involved. All the more surprising, then, was her
shift from horseplay to burlesque in the house-hunting scene with Sam
Bernard, at the end of which the children were shot by their despairing
parents to remove the one obstacle between them and the perfect
apartment. In an earlier scene Collier had had his chance--the one in
which Bernard tried to explain his difficulties and to read a letter.
All of Bernard’s stutterings and flounderings in the English vocabulary
availed nothing against Collier’s imperturbable indifference.
Collier has always had a divine spark--it was visible even in _The
Hottentot_--and in that scene it glowed beautifully. The show was,
to be sure, held in the matrix of Berlin’s score, and was as much held
_down_ as up to that level--I mean it was not spoiled by the intrusion
of alien theatrical elements. Since then a new hydraulic system has
apparently been added to the equipment of the stage, and Hassard Short,
confusing the dynamics of the theatre with mere hoisting power, moves
everything that can be moved except the audience. The elements are all
there, but they are produced as if it were a benefit, not a revue.
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
WILLIE COLLIER. By Alfred Frueh]
John Murray Anderson’s is the hardest case to be sure about. A year
ago he “struck a new note in revues”--by producing one without a
scintilla of interest in any of its proceedings. Nothing quite so
lackadaisical and dull has ever had such a success. Yet he had long
before established a repute for being artistic--and, as far as I can
judge, it was by the exploitation of millions of yards of draperies in
place of the usual canvas scenery. It was a sound notion, and in the
first of these productions, _What’s in a Name?_ there was a pretty air
of the semi-professional, a challenging suggestion of improvisation, as
if the chorus and principals weren’t sure from moment to moment what
the _régisseur_ might suggest for them to do next.
He has always presented some of the loveliest and some of the ugliest
costumes in New York; and now that draperies are no longer his only
resource, he falls back upon transformations in scenery, or makes a
painted backdrop of the Moonlight Sonata come to life, with music, to
the astonishment of the multitude.
In short, it would appear that Mr Anderson is introducing into the
revue precisely that element of artistic bunk which has long been the
property of the bogus arts. I resent it, and resent it the more because
he doesn’t need it. In his recent show there were elements beyond
words to praise; the singing of Yvonne George was superb and superbly
arranged; the Widow Brown song, sung and _danced_ by Bert Savoy, had a
quality of tenderness which all the sentimental songs in the Ziegfeld
Follies try vainly to transmit; the two little tumblers, Fortunello and
Cirillino, are by name and manner of the _commedia dell’arte_ and John
Hazzard’s song about Alaska, with slides by Walter Hoban, is the stuff
that Forty-niners are made of.
It was in this show that the Herriman-Carpenter ballet of Krazy Kat was
tried and dismissed, and the fault here is the fault of Mr Anderson
throughout. Again it was attempted with an artistic dancer, when
everyone who has intelligence of Krazy knows that it should be done by
an American stunt dancer until the time when Mr Chaplin finds time to
do it. Krazy Kat is exquisite and funny--and whether Mr Carpenter lets
him remain so or not, it is clear that Mr Anderson wanted him to be
artistic at all cost. So with his whole production; he has sacrificed
fun all the way down the line; one is pleased, much more than amused,
and the gigantic revelry, the broad levity of Bert Savoy stand apart
from the show like a stranger. It is the one revue in which the mass
dancing entirely fails to remain in the memory, and I am convinced
that if Miss Brice hadn’t, in the Ziegfeld Follies, made _Mon Homme_ a
popular hit, Miss George’s far more fiery and varied and more generally
interesting rendition of it would leave it cold in the ears of the
audiences. For Mr Anderson has so far learned only to put over separate
things, and until you put the whole thing over the individual things
gain but half their victories.
That completes the circle to Mr Ziegfeld, and, since it is a question
of putting it over, associates with him another man who on at least
one occasion has done as well, Mr Charles Dillingham. If you omit the
one man shows as practised by Ed Wynn, Frank Tinney and Al Jolson, and
the nondescripts of Hitchcock, and pass over _Stop! Look! Listen!_ as
varying too far from the revue type, there remains _Watch Your Step_ as
another high spot in production, with the dancing of the Castles, the
humours of that very great comedian, Harry Kelly, and of Tinney, the
scenery and costumes by Robert McQuinn and Helen Dryden, and the whole
story of contemporary dancing in Mr Berlin’s music. Except for Harry
Kelly, every item was bettered in _Stop! Look! Listen!_, but in spite
of the presence of Gaby Deslys, it was not a revue--whereas _Watch
Your Step_ almost consciously set out to proclaim itself superior in
fineness and slickness to the Follies and almost succeeded.
I am trying to sketch the main _types_ of revue, not to write a history
of the revue; it is to be hoped that some one sufficiently sentimental
can be found to do the job. Whether in a history the drunken scene of
Leon Errol in the subway would figure largely, I do not know; I am not
even sure that the scene in the Grand Central while it was building,
with Bert Williams as the porter, would be noted; quite possibly the
memory of Lillian Lorraine on the swings--to me merely a bearable
necessity--and Frank Carter singing, (1918) _I’m Going to Pin My
Medal on the Girl I Left Behind_, will seem more important than Ina
Claire’s mimicry of Frances Starr’s _Marie-Odile_. It is possible that
the injection of real humour, like Lardner’s, may make the set scenes
like Laceland or the History of Shoes through the Ages or Our Colleges
more and more dispensable. I do not know. I feel fairly certain only
of this: that the relative importance of the workers in the field is
measured by their mastery of the art of production far more than by
their skill in picking individuals and stunts. I am also convinced that
those who have arrived at this perfection in an effort to give America
pleasure have done more for us than those who haven’t got half way in
trying to give us art.
_The Darktown Strutters
on Broadway_
THE DARKTOWN STRUTTERS ON BROADWAY
Anyone so minded can write an entirely false history of American
civilization by setting down in parallel columns the vogues and rages
which have overtaken us and Europe at the same time. The highly
patriotic, but a bit undergraduate, habit of slanging your own
country is always more effective if the facts about any other country
are a little obscure, and, thanks to the cable and the efficacy of
transatlantic mails, we now know virtually everything that isn’t so,
and virtually nothing that is important, about Europe. So it is quite
possible for a critic to say that in literature the taste of Europe is
far beyond ours, on the ground that Harold Bell Wright is the typical
American author and Conrad and Anatole France and Tolstoi the typical
European. I mean that this is possible if a critic has never heard of
the work of Nat Gould and William Le Queux in England, for instance.
The latest of these false parallels would be this: that while Europe
was going in for the primitive sculpture of the African negro, America
devoted itself and its theatres to musical shows composed and produced
by the nonprimitive negroes of Harlem, New York.[13] The wail of the
saxophone in _Shuffle Along_ had not yet died in my ears when a
Serious Critic made moan in his journal that the authors of that piece
were truckling to the white man’s sense of superiority by exhibiting
their own flesh and blood as a pack of cheats and scoundrels. What
had impressed me as a fairly awkward mechanism for introducing songs
and dances was by him taken as a libel on a race; and forgetting the
picaresque romance from the _Odyssey_ to _Get-Rich-Quick-Wallingford_,
forgetting that all peoples seem to take an abundant pleasure
in exposing themselves as delightful rogues, he wept over this
degradation. At about that time Mr Clive Bell, marking a reaction from
the extreme vogue of African plastic, still ranked the sculptures
produced by savage and semicivilized negroes as only a little below
those of the two or three great periods of artistic production. Again
it would seem that Europe had, in its effete way, stolen a march on us.
In effect the coloured shows were entertaining and interesting to
think about, whether they were good or bad, and most of them were
pretty bad. As shows, that is. As shows in a country which really knows
how to produce soul-satisfying eye-and-ear entertainment. They had
certain attractive qualities, and if they were in essence second rate,
they were at least dynamic, while the first-rate thing in Europe was
static. While Europe remained calm after the war we, hysterically, went
in for an enormous increase of pace in the active arts of the theatre.
I do not know whether we are altogether the losers, and leave the
question to others. I do know that for a moment these pieces seem to
have overshadowed our (can I say?) native revues.
Of course, in America no one cares for revues except the unenlightened
millions who pay to see them, so there is no one to rise and make
lamentation over this state of affairs. For years we have laboured to
perfect our revues--and the shuffling feet of a barbarian summon up
an evil djinn to banish them. The serene smoothness of manœuvre which
Mr Wayburn prepares for Mr Ziegfeld shrinks from the boards before
the haphazard leaping of unstudied numbers; the sweet gravity of the
dancers is forgotten for the barbarous rhythm of any half dozen darkies
with a sense of syncopation innate in them. Lavishness from Joseph
Urban precariously maintains itself against the smudged backdrop and
the overall; and over the prostrate and flowerlike and seductive
beauty of the chorus-girl, there steps and struts, magnificently
struts, the high-yaller!
The comparatively sober truth is that the negro cabaret in the theatre
is only a diversion, a necessary and healthful variation from our norm.
It has qualities seldom exquisite and always arresting; and these
qualities, having slowly vanished from the revue, have found themselves
again in burlesque and in these exotics. And I think it highly probable
that their only lasting effect will be to restore certain highly
desirable things to revue and musical comedy. If there is any doubt of
their goodness, another contrast will prove the point.
The one claim never made for the negro shows is that they are
artistic. Set beside them, then, a professedly artistic revue, the
_Pinwheel_, compounded of native and exotic effects. It had two or
three interesting or exciting numbers; but the whole effect was one
of dreariness. The pall of art was upon it; it died nightly. And
_Shuffle Along_, without art, but with tremendous vitality, not only
lived through the night, but dragged provincial New Yorkers to a
midnight show as well. Facing the other way, one beholds a straight
fake, the untimely efforts of Messrs McIntyre and Heath, who served
only to remind us that in time since overpast the real nigger show, as
practised by Williams and Walker, existed, and that what we are seeing
now is actually a continuation thereof, brought down from Harlem to
Broadway.
Now it was fairly obvious that _Shuffle Along_ had been conceived as
an entertainment for negroes; that is why it remained solid when it
took Broadway, to the intense surprise of its producers. It was, in
short, an exotic for us, but it wasn’t an exotic for themselves. Its
honesty was its success, and its honesty put a certain stamp upon its
successors. In all of them there is visible a regrettable tendency to
imitate, at moments, the worst features of our usual musical comedy.
But the major portion of each show is native, and so good.
They have all of them an appearance of unpremeditated violence which
distinguishes them from the calculated and beautiful effects of Mr
Ziegfeld or Mr John Murray Anderson. It goes much beyond the celebrated
(and by this time faked) appearance of “enjoying themselves.” They
may never forgive me for it, but I really do not care whether the
actors and actresses who amuse me are having a good time themselves.
The theatre, for them, is a place for _producing_, not for _enjoying_
sensations and effects; so the one thing I wish them is that when
they are good they may have the purely moral pleasure of being good.
It is the method that counts, and in the negro shows the method has
been always the maximum pressure in song and dance, and the minimum of
subtlety in the conversations and patter songs. The exceptions are not
notable.
The songs and dances must be scored _fff_, a _stretto_, and after that
those diverging lines which indicate _crescendo_; the lines of violence
never again approach each other in these numbers, and one has to wait
for the appearance of a fairly silly sentimental song for a moment of
quiet. The strange people who direct these shows and the responsive
animals who sing and dance have with some success controverted the
notion that it is in contrasts that the intelligent man has his
greatest pleasure. One feels that the show is a continuous wild cry and
an uninterrupted joyous rage, that the _élan vital_ is inexhaustible
and unbridled and enormously good.
The most skilful individual player has been Florence Mills; merely to
watch her walk out upon the stage, with her long, free stride and her
superb, shameless swing, is an æsthetic pleasure; she is a school and
exemplar of carriage and deportment; two other actors I have seen so
take a stage; Cohan by stage instinct, Marie Tempest by a cultivated
genius. Florence Mills is almost the definition of the romantic “_une
force qui va_,” but she remains an original, with little or nothing
to give beyond her presence, her instinctive grace, and her baffling,
seductive voice. Without that endowment, a small one in comparison
with, say, Gilda Grey’s, almost all the others give nothing but energy,
and the trouble there is that if you have nothing but energy to give,
you must give more than you can afford. The wild cry is a little too
piercing at times, the postures and the pattings and the leapings
all a little beyond the necessary measure. It remains simple; but
simplicity, even if it isn’t usually vulgar, can be a bit rough.
In the past few years the line of development of most of our revues
and musical shows has been clearly marked; the bad old days were
slowly forgotten and whatever was suggestive had to become subtle;
and gradually, as the surface polish grew brighter, the suggestive
humours underneath were forgotten; our revues became denatured in more
senses than one. There is one _risqué_ moment in the whole of a recent
_Follies_, and that is one more than usual. The twittering about love
and a kiss goes on; but the Great Reality of Sex is (quite properly, I
am sure) forgotten. And in an encore stanza of _He May Be Your Man, But
He Comes to See Me--Sometimes_, as sung at the Plantation, the whole
conventionalized fabric of our popular love songs was flung aside and
the gay reality exposed. This amorous frankness is part of a simple
realism--a sophisticated realism couldn’t occur in a musical show,
unless in the manner of Offenbach’s _La Belle Hélène_. It is a fitting
counterpart to the exaggerated postures, the slightly lubricious
gestures and movements, of the dance. Another simplicity, and a very
good one, is in such a song as that about a dog from Tennessee in _Oh,
Joy_--a song which with that one quality, and against indifferent music
and unexceptional words, broke up the show.
Behind the frankness and the violence and the simplicity there is found
the most important factor of all--the music. And behind that stands
a figure exceedingly attractive and, in its tragedy, almost moving,
that of the late Jim Europe. Of the music itself--of jazz and the use
of spirituals and the whole question of our national music--this is
clearly not the place to write. One wishes to mention a name or two:
Shelton Brooks, least _habile_ of pseudo-Balieffs, wrote long ago _The
Darktown Strutters’ Ball_, which ought not to be forgotten; Creamer
and Layton composed all of _Strut, Miss Lizzie_, and therein appeared
_Sweet Angeline_, as complex a piece of syncopation as Mr Berlin ever
composed. What portion of _Shuffle Along_ was composed by Noble Sissle
and Eubie Blake I do not know, but Sissle in action and Blake at the
piano were wholly satisfying and expert. And all of these composers,
and all of the jazz bands who play for them, have the ineffable
advantage of being assured, in advance, of dancers who in fancy or
straight dancing have the essential feelings for rhythm and broken
rhythm in their bones.
And that interior response to syncopation Jim Europe had to the highest
possible degree. He had been, before the war, the band leader at the
Castles’; I am told by one who knows of such matters that his actual
vogue was passing when the war came. He returned with the 369th U. S.
Infantry “Hell-Fighters” Band and for a few Sunday nights in March,
1919, he packed the old Manhattan Opera House to the doors.
Say that what he played had nothing to do with music; say that to
mention the name of a conductor in the same breath with his name is
an atrocity of taste--I cannot help believing that Jim Europe had the
essential quality of music in him, and that, in his field, however
far from any other it may have been, he was as great as Karl Muck in
his. He did have contrast; it was out of the contracting stresses
of a regular beat and a divergent that he created his effects. The
hand kept perfect time, and his right knee, with a sharp and subtle
little motion, stressed the acceleration or retard of the syncope. His
dynamics were beautiful because he knew the value of noise and knew
how to produce it and how to make it effective; he knew how to keep
perfectly a running commentary of wit over the masses of his sound; and
the ease and smoothness of his own performance as conductor had all
the qualities of greatness. He rebuked a drummer in his band for some
infraction of discipline and was killed.
Whatever the negro show has to give to the perfected Broadway
production has its sources fairly deep in the negro consciousness,
and I put Jim Europe forth as its symbol because in him nearly all
that is most precious came to the surface. He seemed sensitive to the
ecstasy and pathos of the spirituals as he was to the ecstasy and joy
of jazz. He was, as conductor, vigorous and unaffected and clean. In
_Shuffle Along_, Messrs Sissle and Blake paid honour to his memory,
but the unacknowledged debt of the others is greater. I am inclined to
think that, if sterility does not set in for the more notable Broadway
product, it will be because something of what Jim Europe had to give
has been quintessentialized by his successors and adopted.
_Plan For a Lyric
Theatre in America_
PLAN FOR A LYRIC THEATRE IN AMERICA
I am going to establish a lyric theatre in America. Not an art theatre
and not a temple of the drama, and not an experimental theatre. A
lyric theatre where there will always be Mozart and Jerome Kern and
Gilbert-and-Sullivan and Lehar--and NEVER by any chance Puccini or
the Ring or Ibsen. I shall avoid the good things and the bad alike in
the serious forms; I shall have Russian Ballets and American ballets.
The chief thing is that it will be a theatre devoted to _all_ the
forms of light musical entertainment and to nothing else. My theatre
will put an end to those disheartening revivals (or resurrections) of
popular musical shows because the shows will be kept alive, just as
“grand” operas are kept alive by appearing in a repertory. Into the
repertory I shall incorporate--as soon as their independent existence
is at an end--such successes as _The Night Boat_ and such failures
as _The Land of Joy_. There will never be a chance for _fashion_ to
destroy things essentially good. I shall produce new pieces, too; and
if they are good they will run along with frequent presentations until
they are absorbed in the general scheme. And I think I shall have
pastiches frequently--of revues and topical productions which aren’t,
as entireties, capable of continuing.
That is the abridgement of a scheme, and I say I shall do it in the
hope that someone else, even if it be the Messrs Shubert, will do it
instead. Because I like musical comedy and it annoys me that I can
hear _Un bel di_ (which I want never to hear again) fifteen times a
season, and cannot hear _The Sun Shines Brighter_ or _The Ragtime
Melodrama_ ever again. And I know that our present type of musical
comedy is so good, so vigorous and snappy, that it tends to kill
off its predecessors; a repertory is the only thing; and the usual
objections to repertory will fail here, because in this case the
devotees of musical shows will know in advance that “it is going to be
a good show.” I don’t know whether the bill should change every day or
every week; I feel certain that there ought to be half a dozen centres
across the continent, and two or three touring companies. Further
details I cannot give now. I shall try to find some means, however,
of distinguishing between the second-act finale of _The Mottled Mask_
(“On to the ball at the palace of Prince Gregory”) from the second-act
finale of _The Madcap in Motley_ (“On to the ball at the palace of
Prince Gregory”). It is not part of my scheme to keep bad shows alive.
The rare entertainment such a theatre will afford can be guessed if
you look for a moment at the changes in musical shows since 1900. We
were then coming out of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition and (after a
great vogue of extravaganza) coming into the Viennese mode. It is the
fashion now, especially in France, to belittle the Viennese operetta,
to call its waltz song heavy and its structure a bore. Possibly these
things are true; but Vienna has been the home of operetta for over a
century and has done well by itself most of the time. Illumination of
this predominant influence you can get by going to the Redoutensaal
and hearing a performance of _The Marriage of Figaro_, and within the
next few days hearing _Die Fledermaus_ and whatever new piece Lehar
or Fall or Oscar Straus has composed. For what one seldom knows from
its loftier production is that _Figaro_ is in essence and detail a
musical comedy and that almost all we know of the form stems from the
combination effected there by a great composer, a fine dramatist, and
an exceptionally skilful librettist.[14] The imperial ballroom with
its tapestried walls, its small stage on which only conventionalized
scenery can be set, its divided stairway coming down on the stage, is a
setting admirably contrived to give the whole loveliness of operetta.
The last scene is in the garden of the count: six boxed trees and
moonlight create the effect. And at the last moment, the happy ending,
the electric lights are thrown on, the vast crystal chandelier lighting
up over the garden, and the event recedes into its real, its secondary
framework, as entertainment. One recognizes it for what it is--the
gay and exquisite counterpart of grand opera, from which neither the
Savoy nor the Viennese operetta ever departed. Musically the Viennese
type corresponds more clearly to Italian, the Gilbert and Sullivan to
French opera. The absurd conventions of production are taken bodily
from the older and more respected type. The same thing is as obviously
true in Cimarosa’s _Marriage Secret_ as it is in _The Chocolate
Soldier_--the latter being, except for a weaker libretto, a perfect
parallel to _Figaro_. (And nearly as worthy of the perpetual life which
is apparently to be denied it.)
It is still unnecessary to describe the Viennese operetta in detail,
for immediately after the war it came again into vogue and one or two
excellent examples--_The Last Waltz_ was one of them--re-established
some of its ancient prestige. It is at bottom produced _for the music_.
In one the music may be chiefly sung, in another danced. Everything
else--_décor_, story, humorous episodes--is secondary. Recently an
effort has been made to change this. Oscar Straus’ _Törichte Jungfrau_
at the Grossesschauspielhaus (Reinhardt’s catacombs in Berlin) was all
production--and nearly all dreadful. Lehar’s latest, _Das Gelbe Jacke_
(not, however, our _Yellow Jacket_) is entirely in the pure Viennese
mode, and the Vienna production (February, 1923) indicates how Viennese
operetta is improved in transit to our shores. For our production of
musical comedy is almost equal to our production of revue, which is
incontestably the finest in the world. With their emphasis on music the
Viennese shows naturally centre about the famous waltz-song; and one
good waltz has been able to make a show a success. Rudolf Friml made a
success of _High Jinks_ with a fox-trot.
The English type as we know it, including Caryll and Monckton and
Rubens, has had for thirty years the Savoy tradition. This requires
a plot of more frivolity than the Viennese, and lyrics of greater
humour. The successes have been moderate--“I’ve got a motto” is no
masterpiece. The degree of fun has been higher and the seductiveness
of the music less. It was perfectly natural that (with _Adele_ to
help them on) a combination of virtues should take place in America
in the beautiful _Princess Shows_ of Comstock and Gest, where the
talents of P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern, stage-managed
perfectly by Robert Milton, produced a fresh and attractive type of
musical show which for five years progressed in popularity--but had
few imitators--and suddenly seemed to disappear. It was, in fact,
transformed into something else, something good. But one should look at
the original closely to discern its exceptional virtues.
Each of the Princess shows had a reasonable, but not serious, plot.
The advantage of a plot isn’t, as one often hears, that it gives the
appearance of reality to the piece, for who should expect that? There
is no reason why a musical comedy should not be wholly preposterous,
dramatically or psychologically, provided, like _Iolanthe_, it has a
logic of its own. No. The advantage is that when there is a definitely
perceptible structure everything else arrives with greater intensity
of effect. The best of the Princess shows had the weakest plot, for
_Leave It to Jane_ was based on Ade’s _College Widow_, which has no
great quality. Since songs and dances had to take up much time, this
plot was gratifyingly reduced to a few essential lines and played
without sentiment. The result was a rush of action in which everything
found place. The later pieces were on librettos by Guy Bolton,
suggesting French farces, and full of neat arrangements. None of them
was stupid. They all gave place for Mr Wodehouse’s exceptional talents
as a lyric-writer. He is as an English humorist superior to most, and
as a master of complicated, original, amusing rhymes is the best man
in the business. A special quality of making fun is discernible in all
his lyrics, and he does good parodies, like _When It’s Nesting Time
in Flatbush_. The Princess type made rather a fetish of simplicity (I
quote from memory):
Although the thing that’s smart is
To stay out all night on parties,
I’ll be sitting, with my knitting,
In the good old-fashioned way,
and of sentiment:
The breeze in the trees brings a scent of orange blossoms
And the skies turn soft and blue,
When there’s no one around except the girl you love
And the girl you love loves you,
which was often not amorous and rose to as fine a thing as _The Siren
Song_:
Come to us, we’ve waited so long for you,
Every day we make a new song for you;
Come, come, to us, we love you so.
Leave behind the world and its fretting
And we will give you rest and forgetting,
So sang the sirens ages and ages ago.
There was also patter as in the Cleopatra song:
And when she tired, as girls will do,
Of Bill or Jack or Jim,
The time had come, his friends all knew,
To say good-by to him.
She would not stand by any means
Regretful, stormy, farewell scenes,
To such low stuff she would not stoop
So she just put poison in the soup.
When out with Cleopatterer
Men always made their wills;
They knew they had no time to waste.
When the gumbo had that funny taste
They’d take her hand and squeeze it
And murmur, “Oh, you kid!”
But they none of ’em liked to start to feed
Till Cleopatterer did.
and in each of these types Wodehouse was faultless.
Fortunately for him and for us these songs were set to a music which in
addition to being delightful let the words appear, and occasionally
was so fluent, so inevitable, that it made the words seem even simpler
and more conversational than they are. Jerome Kern composed nearly all
of the Princess shows and the collected scores are impressive. He is
the most erudite of our simple composers and he manipulates material
with inordinate skill. He can adapt German folksong (_Freut euch das
Leben_ underlies _Phoebe Snow_); he didn’t do so well by _Kingdom
Comin’_, which was botched and cut; he also understands Sullivan. But
his best work, _The Siren Song_, _The Little Ships_, _The Sun Shines
Brighter_, have a melodious line, a structure, and a general tidiness
of execution which are all their own. _The Siren Song_ corresponds
exactly to the Viennese waltz, but both the words and the music are
impersonal; they are a gentle hymn to seduction, with humour. Scattered
between languorous rhythms are bursts of gaiety, like a handful of
pebbles thrown against a window--which doesn’t open--for the song ends
in a tender melancholy. It is a real achievement. Compare the lines
I have quoted above with “Come, come, I love you only,” from _The
Chocolate Soldier_--phrases you would expect to arrive at the same
musical conclusion. The crash of “_Oh, Hero Mine!_” in the second is
good drama, saved from being too obvious by being sung to the coward
Sergius and not to the protagonist Bluntschli. But in comparison the
gentle ending of _The Siren Song_ is, as song, superior: “So sang the
Sirens, ages and ages ago”--and you take it or leave it. The music, at
least, is not forcing your hand.
The Princess shows never had any great stars; instead, they had the
one quality which always makes for success--_esprit de corps_. In each
the company was aware of the nature and quality of the piece it was
playing, and it worked in variations of that genial and sophisticated
atmosphere. It was simply against the tone of the Princess shows to
be dull; and I, who like nearly all musical shows, found in them my
greatest delight.
They passed into something else because they were exquisitely
proportioned on a small scale--the scale, by the way of _The Beggar’s
Opera_, which they resembled--and the whole tendency of the time was
toward elaboration. They involved small choruses, little eccentric
dancing, and required no humorist _hors de texte_. I count it a triumph
for Mr Dillingham, as well as for the others concerned, that they have
been able to preserve so much of the Princess in some of the Globe
productions. The best of these, I think, is _Good-morning, Dearie_. It
has an adequate plot; it has room for Harland Dixon, a fine dancer; for
Ada Lewis, an expert broad comedienne; for Maurice and his partner,
whose name I don’t remember; for a large dancing chorus and for stunts;
better still it did little to hinder Jerome Kern. It was here that he
took the most famous of waltzes and implicated it masterfully in a
blues; and here that all the seductiveness and gaiety of the Princess
music returned with _Ka-lu-a_ and _Didn’t You Believe?_ There were a
few faults in the production; the _décor_ lacked freshness, although
it didn’t actually offend; the Chinese scene was hackneyed. But on the
whole it is the best musical comedy I have seen since the Princess
shows.
What forced us to be elaborate was not the memory of the Viennese
type, but the growing complexity of revue, always cutting into musical
comedy. It should be noted that _Around the Map_ (which I hold the best
musical comedy--not operetta--I saw before the Princess shows) first
brought Joseph Urban into the field, taking him from the Boston Opera
House and pushing him on the way to Ziegfeld, where he was tardily
recognized by the Metropolitan for whom he has made _Oberon!_ _Around
the Map_ had some twenty scenes, it dealt with a trip around the world
in search of safety socks, and was all gay (with Else Alder), all good
music (Caryll) and only the beginning of elaboration. But Mr Berlin’s
two shows and a host of others indicated that to survive musical
comedy would have to appear lavish. Comparatively simple shows still
occur--_Tangerine_ was one; but we seem to be in for something fairly
elaborate--in music as in the Le-Baron-Kreisler pieces, in _décor_
as in the Shubert-Century productions, in stars and stunts as in
Dillingham’s.
I do not pretend to cover the ground, and to name the names, in this
sketch; not even to characterize all the types. I don’t know what to
say about _Mary_, in which George M. Cohan worked a chorus into a
state of frantic energy and Louis Hirsch provided _The Love Nest;_
nor of twenty other individual successes. One composer remains whose
work is often so good, whose case is so illuminating, that he must be
considered. That is Victor Herbert. It should be said at once that even
long after his early successes he composed a fine musical comedy, _The
Only Girl_. The difficulty about Mr Herbert is that he has succumbed to
the American habit of thinking that grand opera is great opera. I have
heard him at one of his _premières_ speaking from the conductor’s dais
to assure the audience that the present piece was in the high line of
operetta, that more pieces like it would put an end to the vulgarity
of musical shows. The regrettable fact was that _The Madcap Duchess_
put an end to nothing but itself; I recall the name, that Ann Swinburne
was in it, and that it had a good patter song; the rest was doleful.
Whereas two weeks later in the same house I heard _The Lady of the
Slipper_, in which Mr Herbert, setting out to write an ordinary simple
musical show, was a thoroughly competent composer, full of ingenuity
and interest and taste and invention. If he had only taken his eyes off
the Metropolitan Opera House he would probably have been the best of
the lot to-day. He suffers--although he is vastly respected--because
he failed in respect to the fine art of the musical show.
The wonderful thing about that art is that it is made up of varied
elements which are fused into something greater than themselves. There
is a song and dance by Julia Sanderson, who is not a great artist; or
the sudden apparition of a little man pursued in a harem, bounding upon
a scarlet pouffe six feet in diameter and nuzzling like a dog--Jimmy
Barton, in fact, who is one; and the rambling story told by Percival
Knight in _The Quaker Girl_ or the drunken scene by Clifton Crawford
in _The Peasant Girl_; there is _In the Night_, from _The Queen of the
Movies_ or Johnny Dooley falling out of the clerk’s desk in _Listen,
Lester_; there is Donald Brian, the perpetual _jeune premier_, or the
amazing Spanish song in _Apple Blossoms_, or a setting designed by
Norman-Bel Geddes or costumes by Helen Dryden or the _Sandman_ song
from _The Dollar Princess_, or the entrance of the Bulgarians in _The
Chocolate Soldier_ or the wickedly expert prosody of Brian Hooker. What
is it takes all of these and composes them into something beautiful and
entertaining? Skill in production is part of it, but not all, for the
same elements: colour, light, sound, movement, can be combined into
other forms which lack that particular air of urbanity, of well-being,
of rich contentment and interest which is the special atmosphere
of musical shows. I can only find a word and say that the secret
resides in it--high spirits. For a musical comedy, even a sentimental
one, must be high-spirited in execution--that was the lesson of an
unsentimental one, _The Beggar’s Opera_; and at the same time there
must be some courage, some defiance of nature and sound sense, a
feeling for fantasy, which means that the life of the spirit is high,
even when the life of the body is in chains. It is for this freedom of
the spirit, released by music as always and diverted by all the other
elements in them, that these shows are cherished. It is, naturally, as
a counter-attack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre.
_The One-Man Show_
THE ONE-MAN SHOW
When all the other grave æsthetic questions about the stage are
answered, some profound theorist may explain the existence of the
one-man show. Since I am not a materialist, I cannot concede the
obvious solution--that a man finds enough money to produce himself in
a Broadway show--because there is something attractive and mysterious
about this type of entertainment which the explanation fails to explain.
The theory of the one-man show is apparently that there are individuals
so endowed, so versatile, and so beloved, that no other vehicle will
suffice to let them do their work. Conversely, that they are of such
quality that _they_ suffice for the strange entertainment with which
they are surrounded and that nothing else matters provided they are
long and frequent on the stage. Six men and two women are in the first
roster of the one-man show: Fred Stone, Ed Wynn, Raymond Hitchcock,
Eddie Cantor, Frank Tinney, and Al Jolson; below them, leading the
women, Elsie Janis and Nora Bayes. And omitting Jolson because he is so
great that he cannot be put in any company, the greatest one-man show
was one in which none of these appeared--it was one in which even the
man himself didn’t appear. It was a show in which one man succeeded
where all of these, this time not excluding Jolson, had failed: for he
made the whole production _his kind_ of show--and the others have never
quite managed to do more than make themselves.
The chief example of this failure is Hitchcock, whose series lapses
ever so often, leaving him stranded on the bleak shore of a _Pin Wheel
Revue_--an artistic, an intellectual, an incredibly stupid production
which Hitchy manfully tried first to save and then to abandon. There
were in the better Hitchy shows other first-rate people: one who
masqueraded as Joseph Cook and was none other than Joe Cook the
Humorist out of vaudeville and out of his element; Ray Dooley was with
Hitchy, I believe, and there were always good dancers. Hitchy kept on
the stage a long time, as _conférencier_ and as participant, and his
amiable drollery was always at the same level--just enough. He never
quite concealed the strain of making a production _go_; one always
wanted to be much more amused, and Hitchy never got beyond the episode
of the Captain of the Fire Brigade or trying to buy the middle two-cent
stamp in a sheet of a hundred. A series of vaudeville sketches doesn’t
make a one-man show, even if he plays in all of them; and the moment
Hitchcock was off, _Hitchy-koo_ went to pieces, some good and some bad,
and all trying a little too hard to be something else.
[Illustration: EDDIE CANTOR
By Roland Young]
Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson appear in the two different Winter
Garden types of show--the Jolson and the Winter Garden _in impuris
naturalibus_. Jolson infuses something both gay and broad into his
pieces; even the recurrence of Lawrence D’Orsay cannot win back the
original Winter Garden atmosphere and even the disappearance of
Kitty Doner cannot diminish Jolson’s private quality. Of the straight
Winter Garden shows, the 1922 with Eddie Cantor was the best in ten
years, made so by Cantor and made by him, in spite of the billing,
into a one-man show. The nervous energy of Cantor isn’t sufficient
to animate the active, but indifferent choruses of the Shuberts. One
thing, however, he can do superbly--the lamb led to the slaughter. It
is best when he chooses to play the timid, Ghetto-bred, pale-faced
Jewish lad, seduced by glory or the prospects of pay into competing
with athletes and bruisers. One thing he cannot do and should learn
not to try--the black-face song and comedy of his master, Jolson. The
scenes of violence vary; that of the osteopath was an exploitation of
meaningless brutality; I cared for nothing after Eddie’s frightened
entrance, “Are you the Ostermoor?” But the aviation examination
and the application for the police force were excellent pieces of
construction, holding sympathy all the way through and keeping on the
safe side of nausea. Both of these were before the Winter Garden days
and the Winter Garden exploit was better than either. He played here
a cutter in a hand-me-down clothing store and it was his function to
leap into the breach whenever a customer showed the slightest tendency
to leave without buying a suit. The victim was obsessed by some idea
of having “a belt in the back” and was forced into sailor suits and
fancy costume and was generally made miserable. Eddie’s terrific rushes
from the wings, his appeals to God to strike him dead “on the spot”
if the suit now being tried on wasn’t the best suit in the world, his
helplessness and his, “Well, kill me, so kill me,” as apology when his
partner revealed the damning fact that that happened to be the man’s
old suit--all of this was worth the whole of the Potash-Perlmutter
cycle. And the whole-heartedness of Cantor’s violence--essentially the
bullying of a coward who has at last discovered some one weaker than
himself, was faultless. He sings well the slightly suggestive songs
like _After the Ball_ (new version), and his three broken dance steps
with the sawing motion of his gloved hands create an image exceedingly
precise and palpable. There is in him just enough for the one-man
show, but so far it has been limited by his tendency to imitate and by
failure to develop his own sources of strength. Even in _Kid Boots_ he
just fails to make the grade.
[Illustration: FRANK TINNEY
By Roland Young]
The one-man show _requires_ its leader to leave nothing in himself
unexploited--there is too much for him to do and he must take
everything on himself--the requirements are exactly opposite to those
of the vaudeville act where the actor must work in the briefest
compass, with the utmost concentration, and get his effects in the
shortest time. Frank Tinney’s success in vaudeville marks the
limitations of his success in his shows--for he imposed on vaudeville
that languid easy-going manner of his and was just enough out of
vaudeville tempo (he is very deceptive in this) to appear to be a
novelty there. In essence he isn’t a good one-man, for his line is
limited and his humour and his good-humour (in which he is matched only
by Ed Wynn) are not capable of the strain of a long winter’s evening
entertainment. Tinney was excellent in a quarrel scene with Bernard
Granville (in a Ziegfeld _Follies_, I think) the two pacing in opposite
directions, the width of the stage between them, always from footlights
to backdrop and never crossing the stage; he was disputatious and
entertaining on the negative of the proposition that the Erie railroad
(pronounced for reasons of his own, Ee-righ) is a very expensive
railroad; his appearance in _Watch Your Step_ was almost perfect.
(Consult Mr A. Woollcott’s _Shouts and Murmurs_ for everything about
Tinney; Mr Woollcott’s descriptions are accurate and evocative and he
errs only in his estimate of Tinney’s quality.) Tinney has everything
except the excess of vitality, the surcharge of genius. He has method
nearly to perfection and it is a wholly original, ingratiating, and, up
to a certain point, adaptable method. What he has done is to destroy
the “good joke,” for all of Tinney’s jokes are bad ones and he gets his
effect by fumbling about with them, by lengthening the preliminaries,
by false starts, erasures, corrections--until his arrival at the point
relieves the suspense. I have heard him take at least ten minutes to
put over: “Lend me a dollar for a week, old man.--Who is the weak old
man?” and not a moment was superfluous. He is expert at kidding the
audience, and as he is never in character he never steps out. There
isn’t quite enough of him, that is all.
There is enough of Fred Stone for versatility and not enough for
specific personal appeal. As acrobat, dancer, ventriloquist, and cut-up
Stone is easily in the lead; but the unnamable quality is lacking.
See him climbing up an arbour to meet his Juliet in the balcony; he
is discovered, hangs head downward in peril of his life, seizes a
potted flower and with it begins to dust the vines--it is Chaplinesque
in conception and beautifully executed. See him on the slack rope
continually on the point of falling off and continually recovering and
seeming to hang on by his boot toe; or in _The Lady of the Slipper_
making a beautiful series of leaps from chair to divan, from divan to
table, to a triumphant exit through the unsuspected scenery; or in
another quality recall the famous “Very good, Eddie,” of _Chin-Chin_.
He is incredible; one wouldn’t miss him for worlds; yet it is always
what he does and not himself that constitutes the attraction. I wonder
whether I do not wrong him altogether by classing him with the one-men,
for it was always something more than Montgomery and Stone in the days
of _The Red Mill_ and Stone does not exaggerate himself on the stage.
His command of attributes is greater than that of any other player;
he does everything with a beautiful, errorless accuracy--and the
pleasure of seeing things _exactly right_, all the time, is not to be
underestimated.
[Illustration: ED. WYNN
By Roland Young]
It is Ed Wynn’s pleasure to make everything seem utterly haphazard.
Wynn is a surd in the theatre--there is always something left
unresolved in reducing him to the lowest term, and he is
incommensurable because there are no standards for him and no similars.
I prefer to see him wandering through a good revue, changing hats,
worrying about a “rewolwer” in the first scene and stopping dead in
the twentieth to declare that it wasn’t a “rewolwer” at all, but a
pistol. When he came to put on a one-man show he preserved the best
part of this incoherence. He made it his business to appear before a
drop curtain and explain in an amazing vocabulary and with painstaking
gravity exactly what was to occur in the next scene. He affects to be
awkward (to quote him, I might go so far as to call him uncouth.... I
think I _will_ call him uncouth.... He is uncouth); his gestures are
florid and wide, his earnestness makes all things vivid. Each of these
explanations involves a bad pun and none, of course, has anything to
do with the scene that actually follows. Like Jolson and Cantor, he
takes the stage at a given moment and entertains. His famous inventions
seemed to be the crudest form of humour--a typewriter carriage for
eating corn on the cob, a burning candle to set in one’s ears in order
to wake up in time--yet sheer ebullition carried them high into the
field of “nice, clean fun.” Wynn’s words come tumbling out of him,
agglutinated, chaotic, disorderly; he is abashed by his own occasional
temerity, he is timid and covers it with brashness--and all of this
is a carefully created personage; it is _not_ Ed Wynn. He has found a
little odd corner of life which no one else cultivates; it is a sort of
rusticity in the face of _simple_ things; he is a perpetual immigrant
obsessed by hats and shoes and words and small ideas, instead of
bothering about skyscrapers. The deepness of his zanylike appreciation
of every-day things is the secret of his capacity for making them
startling and funny. His one fault is the show with which he surrounds
himself.
I have never seen Elsie Janis better than she was in _The Lady of the
Slipper_--with the exception of Gaby Deslys I have never seen any woman
comparable to Miss Janis in that piece, and in it she had qualities
which ought to have made her appearance in an individual show a much
greater success than it actually turned out to be. For, except a
voice, Miss Janis has everything. She is a beautiful dancer and her
legs are handsomer than Mistinguett’s, and she is the finest mimic I
have ever seen on the stage, several shades ahead of Ina Claire. An
exceptional intelligence operates in the creation of these caricatures,
for they are all created by seizing upon vital characteristics of
tone, gesture, tempo of movement, spirit; and the arrangement of her
hair and the contortions of her face are only guide-signs to the
accomplished act. She is herself of an abounding grace, a suppleness
of body and of mind, and the measure of her skill is the exact degree
in which her grace and simplicity are transformed into harshness or
angularity or sophistication as she passes one after another of our
stage personalities before her mirror. This year I saw her in a Paris
music-hall take off Mistinguett and Max Dearly. She presented them
singing _Give Me Moonlight_ in their own imagined versions and her
throaty “Give me a gas light” for the creator of _Mon Homme_ was
superb. She offered to sing it, at the end, as she herself ought to
sing it--and danced it without uttering a sound. It reminded one of
Irene Castle in _Watch Your Step_. For an exact calculation of her
capacities and a sensible, modest intention to stay within them and
to exploit them to the limit are parts of Elsie Janis’s intelligence.
To be sure, it isn’t her intelligence--it is her loveliness and her
talent that endear her to us. But it is grateful, for once in a way,
to find a talent so great, a loveliness so irresistible, joined to an
intelligence which sets all in motion and spoils nothing.
I suspect that in spite of the best of the one-man shows there is
something wrong with the idea--perhaps because the environment requires
more than any man has yet been able to give. And the one perfect
example is, as I have suggested, proof of this. Because _Stop! Look!
Listen!_ which was only a moderate success on Broadway and involved
the talents of Gaby Deslys, Doyle and Dixon, Harry Fox, Tempest and
Sunshine, the beautiful Justine Johnston, Helen Barnes, Helen Dryden
as costumer and Robert McQuinn as scenic designer, a beautiful chorus
and an excellent producer, was actually the one-man show of Irving
Berlin. For once a complete and varied show expressed the spirit of one
man to perfection. In that piece, Berlin wrote two of his masterpieces
and about four other superb songs; and, more than that, suffused the
entire production with the gay spirit of his music. There occurred
_The Ragtime Melodrama_ danced by Doyle and Dixon--only the Common Clay
scene from the Cohan revue ever approached it, and Doyle and Dixon
never danced better (unless, possibly, a quarter of an hour earlier
in _The Hula-Hula_); there was _The Girl on the Magazine Cover_,
perfectly set and costumed, a really good sentimental song with its
quaint introduction of _Lohengrin_ (not the _Wedding March_); there
was _When I Get Back to the U. S. A._ sung against a chorus of _My
Country, ’Tis of Thee_; there was Gaby’s wicked _Take Off a Little
Bit_ and Harry Fox’s _Press-Agent Song_--and finally the second of
Berlin’s three great tributes to his art: _I Love a Piano_, which,
like the mother of Louis Napoleon, he wrote for six pianos and in
which everything in syncopation up to that time was epitomized and
carried to a perfect conclusion. Whatever was gay, light, colourful,
whatever was accurate, assured, confident, and good-humoured, was in
this miraculous production. I saw it twelve times in two weeks--lured
partly, I must confess, by the hope that Harry Pilcer would break at
least a leg in his fall down the golden stairs. He never did; in spite
of which, seeing it again, months later, it still seemed to me the
apotheosis of pure show. I think I could reconstruct every moment of
it, including the useless plot and Justine Johnston’s ankles; it seems
a pity that all of it, the ephemeral and the permanent, should have
already passed from the stage. It was a beginning in ragtime operetta
which Mr Berlin has never followed up; his inexhaustible talents have
been diverted into other things; he is now a maker of revues. Yet when
he saw _The Beggar’s Opera_, Mr Berlin felt something plucking at his
sleeve, reminding him that it was his job, and his alone, to create the
comparable type for America.
At that moment he thought back to _Stop! Look! Listen!_--but he had
already begun to build the Music Box--and we must wait patiently for
what time will bring as a real successor to his one-man show. At any
rate, we have had it. We know, now, what it can amount to--and it is
enough. Enough, at any rate, to put the veritable one-man show fairly
definitely out of the running.
_The Dæmonic in the
American Theatre_
THE DÆMONIC IN THE AMERICAN THEATRE
One man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed--Al
Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their dæmons are not of the same order, but
together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we
ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a
Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business
organization--and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the
creation of dæmonic individuals. We can bring forth Roosevelts--dynamic
creatures, to be sure; but the fury and the exultation of Jolson is a
hundred times higher in voltage than that of Roosevelt; we can produce
courageous and adventurous women who shoot lions or manage construction
gangs and remain pale beside the extraordinary “cutting loose” of Fanny
Brice.
To say that each of these two is possessed by a dæmon is a mediæval and
perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does
not prove anything--not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high
rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because
it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found
only at moments in other aspects of American life--in religious mania,
in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular
intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but
may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco, nor
at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange and
you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our
skyscraper architecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian
Ballet.
In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever
he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that
one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest
seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up--for
the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is
extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation
so much energy, violence, so much of the _totality_ of one human being,
that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. In the days
when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in
America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting--yet always
essentially dancing and singing--upon it was the concentration of our
national health and gaiety. In _Row, Row, Row_ he would bounce up on
the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the
audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from the seat of his trousers,
and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny.
The very phonograph record of his famous _Toreador_ song is full of
vitality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply “Al
Jolson” (about 10.15 P.M. in each of his reviews) he appears and
sings and talks to the audience and dances off--and when he has done
more than any other ten men, he returns and, blandly announcing that
“You ain’t heard nothing yet,” proceeds to do twice as much again. He
is the great master of the one-man show because he gives so much while
he is on that the audience remains content while he is off--and his
electrical energy almost always develops activity in those about him.
[Illustration:
FANNY BRICE
]
If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence _per se_ in the
American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and restrain,
and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who lacks
discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence. He
has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble
presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be
impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the stage;
of course he is always Jolson--but he is also always Gus and always
Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a way of being
for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in the mad
world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are singularly
creditable characteristics of themselves--not of Jolson. You may
recall a scene--I think the show was called _Dancing Around_--in which
a lady knocks at the door of a house. From within comes the voice of
Jolson singing, “You made me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t
wanna do it”--the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes--it is a
swift characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and
ready to insult callers, since the master is out. Suddenly the black
face leaps through the doorway and cries out, “We don’ want no ice,”
and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, reproached by
his master for a long absence. His lips begin to quiver, his chin
to tremble; the tears are approaching, when his human independence
softly asserts itself and he wails, “We all have our _moments_.” It
is quite true, for Jolson’s technique is the exploitation of these
moments; he has himself said that he is the greatest master of hokum
in the business, and in the theatre the art of hokum is to make each
second count for itself, to save any moment from dulness by the happy
intervention of a slap on the back, or by jumping out of character and
back again, or any other trick. For there is no question of legitimacy
here--everything is right if it makes ’em laugh.
He does more than make ’em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced
is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I
remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war,
and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of _Sinbad_. The
spectacle of Jolson’s vitality had the same quality as the impression
I got from the New York sky line--one had forgotten that there still
existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high,
and that anyone could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. He
sang on that occasion _’N Everything_ and _Swanee_. I have suggested
elsewhere that hearing him sing _Swanee_ is what book reviewers and
young girls loosely call an experience. I know what Jolson does with
false sentiment; here he was dealing with something which by the grace
of George Gershwin came true, and there was no necessity for putting
anything over. In the absurd black-face which is so little negroid that
it goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image
after image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly
in _its_ rhythm. Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate
show, before an audience listless or hostile, sing this outdated and
forgotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him,
the same image--and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and
happiness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was
marvelous. In the first weeks of _Sinbad_ he sang the words of _’N
Everything_ as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many
phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense
of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries
and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the absurd
song about “It isn’t raining rain, It’s raining violets” and remarked
him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious bathos, with
his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd
_fortissimi_ and the general air of kidding the piece.
He does not generally kid his Mammy songs--as why should he who sings
them better than anyone else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks
restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs
until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them.
I dislike them and dislike his doing them--as I dislike Belle Baker
singing _Elie, Elie!_ But it is quite possible that my discomfort at
these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap
jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson’s only
faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established
an intimate relation with no less than a million people, every
twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing
which sets him so far above all the other one-man-show stars. Eddie
Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always
and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so
holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the
audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right,
Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what
he is doing, but one sees that he doesn’t half realize the power and
intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help
thinking of him as a genius.
Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn’t reached. She hasn’t, to begin
with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate
mind and a richer humour--qualities which generally destroy vitality
altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur;
and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert,
without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to
create the whole of mediæval France for us in ten lines of a song.
The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny’s evocations are as
vivid and as poignant as Yvette’s--they require from us exactly the
same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and
made immortal, _I Should Worry_. Hear her now creating the tragedy
of _Second-Hand Rose_ or of the one Florodora Baby who--“five little
dumbells got married for money, And I got married for love....” These
things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert’s material missing,
for there are no accessories and, although the words (some of the best
are by Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn’t always distinguished.
And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get
her teeth into, _Mon Homme_, and the result is less certain, but not
less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for
Mistinguett, who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when she
appeared in America. Miss Brice took it _lento affetuoso_; since the
precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather more
outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny altogether in
this song--she was being, I fear, “a serious artist”; but she is of
such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this. Yvonne George
sang it better simply because the figure she evoked as Mon Homme was
exactly the fake apache about whom it was written, and not the “my
feller” who lurked behind Miss Brice. It was amusing to learn that
without a Yiddish accent and without those immense rushes of drollery,
without the enormous gawkishness of her other impersonations, Miss
Brice could put a song over. But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and
to Fanny I return.
Fanny is one of the few people who “make fun.” She creates that
peculiar quality of entertainment which is wholly light-hearted and
everything else is added unto her. Of this special quality nothing
can be said; one either sees it or doesn’t, savours it or not.
Fanny arrives on the scene with an indescribable gesture--after
seeing it twenty times I believe that it consists of a feminine
salute, touching the forehead and then flinging out her arm to the
topmost gallery. There is magic in it, establishing her character at
once--the magic must reside in her incredible elbow. She hasn’t so
much to give as Jolson, but she gives it with the same generosity,
there are no reserves, and it is all for fun. Her Yiddish Squow (how
else can I spell that amazing effect?) and her Heiland Lassie are
examples--there isn’t an _arrière-pensée_ in them. “The Chiff is after
me ... he says I appil to him ... he likes my type ...” it is the
complete give away of herself and she doesn’t care.
[Illustration:
AL JOLSON
]
And this carelessness goes through her other exceptional qualities
of caricature and satire. For the first there is the famous Vamp, in
which she plays the crucial scene of all the vampire stories, preluding
it with the first four lines of the poem Mr Kipling failed to throw
into the wastepaper basket, and fatuously adding, “I can’t get over
it”--after which point everything is flung into another plane--the
hollow laughter, the haughty gesture, the pretended compassion, that
famous defense of the vampire which here, however, ends with the
magnificent line, “I may be a bad woman, but I’m awful good company.”
In this brief episode she does three things at once: recites a parody,
imitates the moving-picture vamp, and creates through these another,
truly comic character. For satire it is Fanny’s special quality that
with the utmost economy of means she always creates the original in the
very process of destroying it, as in two numbers which are exquisite,
her present opening song in vaudeville with its reiterations of Victor
Herbert’s _Kiss Me Again_, and her Spring Dance. The first is pressed
far into burlesque, but before she gets there it has fatally destroyed
the whole tedious business of polite and sentimental concert-room
vocalism; and the second (Fanny in ballet, with her amazingly angular
parody of five-position dancing) puts an end forever to that great
obsession of ours, classical interpretative dancing.
Fanny’s refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson’s; her effects
are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The frenzy which
takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has the supreme
pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong--and her spirits mount and
intensify with every moment on the stage. She creates rapidly and her
characterizations have an exceptional roundness and fulness; when the
dæmon attends she is superb.
It is noteworthy that these two stars bring something to America
which America lacks and loves--they are, I suppose, two of our most
popular entertainers--and that both are racially out of the dominant
caste. Possibly this accounts for their fine carelessness about our
superstitions of politeness and gentility. The medium in which they
work requires more decency and less frankness than usually exist in our
private lives; but within these bounds Jolson and Brice go farther, go
with more contempt for artificial notions of propriety, than anyone
else. Jolson has re-created an ancient type, the scalawag servant
with his surface dulness and hidden cleverness, a creation as real as
Sganarelle. And Fanny has torn through all the conventions and cried
out that gaiety still exists. They are parallel lines surcharged with
vital energy. I should like to see that fourth-dimensional show in
which they will meet.
_These, Too ..._
THESE, TOO ...
Remy de Gourmont has propounded, somewhere, an interesting theory. If
life is worth anything _per se_, is the substance of the argument,
then we do wrong to live it in a series of high moments separated by
long hours of dulness. We ought to take the _amount_ of energy, or
ecstasy, we possess, and spread it as thin as possible, relishing each
moment for itself, each being as good as any other. (I do not mean that
Gourmont endorsed this philosophy; he discussed it.) It is, of course,
the logical conclusion of burning _always_ with a hard gemlike flame,
for if one is to be always _anything_ it is more likely to be calm and
languorous and reserved; that is the difference between burning and
burning up--of which Pater was aware.
We have all had these days of halcyon perfection, when the precise
degree of warmth was a miracle, when the aroma of a wine seemed to
have the whole fragrance of the earth, when one could do anything or
nothing and be equally content. In the presence of great works of art
we experience something similar. We are suspended between the sense of
release from life, the desire to die before the image of the supremely
beautiful, and a new-found capacity for living. Our daily existence
gives us no such opportunity; we cannot live languorously because we
have no leisure, and we are compelled to be intense at rare intervals
if life isn’t to be entirely a hoax and a bore. In the preoccupations
of daily life a tragic incident or an outburst of temper or a
perfectly cut street dress or the dark-light before a storm, may give
us, apart from our emotional lives, the intensity we require. We rather
defend ourselves from the impact of great beauty, of nobility, of high
tragedy, because we feel ourselves incompetent to master them; we
preserve our individual lives even if we diminish them.
The minor arts are, to an extent, an opiate--or rather they trick
our hunger for a moment and we are able to sleep. They do not wholly
satisfy, but they do not corrupt. And they, too, have their moments of
intensity. Our experience of perfection is so limited that even when
it occurs in a secondary field we hail its coming. Yet the minor arts
are all transient, and these moments have no lasting record, and their
creators are unrewarded even by the tribute of a word. A moment comes
when everything is exactly right, and you have an occurrence--it may
be something exquisite or something unnamably gross; there is in it
an ecstasy which sets it apart from everything else. The scene of the
“swaree” in the _Pickwick Papers_ has that quality; nearly the whole
of _South Wind_ has it (I choose examples as disparate as possible).
The whole performance of _Boris_ by Chaliapin (the second time he
sang it at the Metropolitan on his second visit to the United States)
had precisely the same exaltation--and Conrad Veidt as Cesare had one
comparable moment: the breathless second when the draperies seem
to cling to the ravished virgin in the hands of the Somnambulist. It
is an unpredictable event; but there are those on whom one can count
to approach it. All of those I am writing about here have given me
that thrill at least once--and my memory goes back to these occasions,
trying to catch the incredible moment again.
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of A. and C. Boni_)
LEON ERROL. By Alfred Frueh
]
It will be impossible to communicate even the sense of it unless
the material be dissociated from the event. Surely there is nothing
exquisite in the roaring charwoman created by George Monroe. He had
to an inspiring degree the capacity to be one of those vast figures
in Dickens--Mrs Gamp to perfection--and it is odd that another
impersonator, Bert Savoy, should have created, in Margie, Mrs Gamp’s
own confidante and admirer, the devoted Mrs Harris. George Monroe’s
creation was huge and cylindrical--more like a drainpipe than a woman
in shape. There was no effort at realism, for Monroe roared in a deep
bass voice, and his “Be that as it ma-a-y” was a leer in the face
of all logic, order, and decency. There was in it an unrestraint,
a wildness, an independent commonness which rendered it immortal.
The creation of Bert Savoy is at the other extreme. It is female
impersonation and the figure is always the same--the courtesan whose
ambition it is to be a demi-mondaine. Savoy makes capital of all his
defects down to the rakish slanting hat over one eye. His repetitions,
apparently so spontaneous, are beautifully timed and spaced; the
buzz and pause in the voice--“you muzzt com’over ... you don’t know
the ha-ff of it, dear-ie” fix themselves in memory. He is remembered
for the excellent stories he tells, and they are worth it, but the
interpolations are funnier than the climax. The audacity is colossal
and disarming. The occurrence of a character out of Petronius on
our stage is exceptional in itself, that it should at the same time
be slightly vicious and altogether charming, funny and immoral and
delicate, is the wonder.
Last year there was an added touch, when Savoy danced while he sang a
stanza about the Widow Brown. It was as delicate, it passed as quickly,
as breath on a windowpane.[15]
I repeat the material doesn’t matter. For Leon Errol has nothing but
the type drunkard to work with, and is wonderful. In his case it is
easy to analyse the basis of the effect--it is in the loping dance
step into which he converts the lurch of the drunkard. The tawdry
moment--funny enough if you can bear it--is always Errol’s breathing
into someone else’s face; the great moment comes directly after, when
the lurch and the fall are worked up into a complete arc of dance
steps, ending in three little hops as a sort of proof of sobriety.
Jimmy Barton has the same quality in his skating scene--he uses less
material and the movement round the rink is beautiful to watch. But of
him it is useless to speak. Someone has pointed out that he can slap
the bare back of a woman and make that funny!
It is interesting to see how many of the people who give this special
quality arrive out of burlesque. Harry Kelly is another. I recall him
first with Lizzie the Fish Hound in _Watch Your Step_ and last in a
quite useless musical comedy, _The Springtime of Youth_ (textually that
was the title--and in 1922!) For two acts he was wholly wasted. In the
third he was magnificent. He was playing the obdurate father: “No son
of mine shall ever marry a daughter of the Baxters” was his line. He
was informed that she was, in fact, an adopted daughter and that her
uncle had left her the bulk of his fortune. For precisely a minute and
a half Kelly played with the word “bulk”--one saw it registered in his
brain, saw an idea germinating, felt it working forward to the jaw
before the cavernous voice gave it utterance--and again one felt the
inner struggle _not_ to say it a third time, one felt the conflict of
pride and avarice. It was remarkably delicate and fine--so is all of
Kelly’s work when he has a chance. His spare figure, long hands, and
unbelievable voice always create a character--and it isn’t always the
same character.
Bobby Clarke’s scene with the lion comes at once to mind (it is another
burlesque act), and Bert Williams--in many scenes--always soft spoken,
always understanding his case. There were five minutes of Blanche Ring
and Charles Winninger, once, at the Winter Garden; to my surprise,
there were more than that for Eugene and Willie Howard at the same
house, but they were gained in spite of the Winter Garden technique
which underestimates even the lowest intelligence. Willie is rather
like Fanny Brice at moments; when he cuts loose one has an agreeable
sense of uncertainty. Joe Jackson,[16] actually a great clown, although
one doesn’t recognize this in the highly developed medium he chooses,
has exactly the opposite effect--he doesn’t cut loose at all; he
develops. Everything he does is careful and nothing exaggerated, so you
think at first that, although he will be funny, he will not quite reach
that top notch on which an artist teeters perilously while you wonder
whether he will fall over or keep his balance. Yet Jackson gets there.
As the tramp cyclist his acrobatics are good, his make-up enchanting;
but his expressed attitude of mind is his most precious quality. It
becomes almost too much to watch him worrying with a motor horn which
has become detached from the handlebars and which he cannot replace. He
tries it everywhere; at the end he is miserably trying to hang it up on
the air, and when it fails to catch there he is actually wretched.
His movements are full of grace--like those of the grotesque, Alberto,
among the Fratellini--and the ecstasy he gives comes by a surexcess
of laughter. Another moment of great delicacy, without laughter,
however, is that in which Fortunello and Cirrilino swing about on the
broomstick. They are a lovely pair, and the little one seated on the
palm of the other’s hand is a beautiful picture.
[Illustration:
BERT SAVOY
]
Either few women are brought out of burlesque, or women haven’t the
exceptional quality I care for. In any case they have seldom given me
the excess of emotion by what they have done. Their beauty is quite
another matter on which I fail to commit myself. Ada Lewis, in her
broad and grand way, has the stuff, and Florence Moore. And once in
each performance you can be sure that Gilda Grey will utter a sound
or tremble herself into a bacchanalian revel. For the most part her
singing is undistinguished, and I do not care for the anxious way in
which she regards her members, as if she fancied they would fall off
by dint of shimmying. Yet I have never gone to a show of hers without
hearing some echo of the nymphs pursued, or seeing a movement of
abandon and grace. The dark shuddering voice is sub-human, the movement
divinely animal.
Different in every way, but exquisite in every way, was Gaby Deslys.
It is good form now to belittle her; she was so vulgar; she came so
much on the crest of a revolution, she was such a bidder for our great
precious commodity--news space. Ah, well! we have given publicity to
less worthy causes. For she was perfect of her type, and in her hard,
calculating, sublimely decent way she made us like the type. It was
gently vicious--the whole manner. It was overdone--the pearls and the
peacock feathers. But behind was a lovely person--lovely to look at
and enchanting to all the senses. No, she couldn’t act--how pitiable
her loyal efforts; she sang badly; she wasn’t one of the world’s great
dancers. But she had something irreducible, not to be hindered or
infringed upon--her definite self. She was, to begin with, outcast
of our moral system, and she made us accept her because she was an
independent human being. She had a sound and accurate sense of her
personal life, of her rights as an individual. Nothing could stand
against her--and it is said that when she was at grips, at the end,
with something more powerful than popular taste, she still held her
own, and died rather than suffer the spoiling of her beauty. If that
were true one could hardly wish even her beauty back again.
_The “Vulgar”
Comic Strip_
THE “VULGAR” COMIC STRIP
Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and
with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty
million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily
fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do
this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and
culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dulness, and, for all I
know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who
feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of
their distaste.
Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the
comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is
extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the
intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are
not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we
have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off
in ridiculous postures--a counterpart to our inveterate passion for
seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes. And the fact that we do
care for the comic strip--that Jiggs and Mutt-and-Jeff and Skinnay and
the Gumps have entered into our existence as definitely as Roosevelt
and more deeply than Pickwick--ought to make them worth looking at,
for once. Certainly they would have been more sharply regarded if they
had produced the counterpart of Chaplin in the comic film--a universal
genius capable of holding the multitude and exciting the speculations
of the intellectuals. It happens that the actual genius of the comic
strip, George Herriman, is of such a special sort that even when he is
recognized he is considered something apart and his appearance among
other strips is held to be only an accident.
It is by no means an accident, for the comic strip is an exceptionally
supple medium, giving play to a variety of talents, to the use of
many methods, and it adapts itself to almost any theme. The enormous
circulation it achieves imposes certain limitations: it cannot be
too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must
avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears
in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for
acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from its mockery.
These and other restrictions have gradually made of the comic strip a
changing picture of the average American life--and by compensation it
provides us with the freest American fantasy.
In a book which appeared about two years ago, _Civilization in the
United States_, thirty Americans rendered account of our present state.
One of them, and one only, mentioned the comic strip--Mr Harold E.
Stearns--and he summed up the “intellectual” attitude perfectly by
saying that _Bringing Up Father_ will repay the social historian for
all the attention he gives it. I do not know in what satisfactions the
social historian can be repaid. I fear that the actual fun in the
comic strip is not one of them. _Bringing Up Father_, says Mr Stearns,
“symbolizes better than most of us appreciate the normal relation of
American men and women to cultural and intellectual values. _Its very
grotesqueness and vulgarity are revealing_” (italics mine). (Query: Is
it vulgar of Jiggs to prefer Dinty’s café to a Swami’s lecture? Or of
Mrs Jiggs to insist on the lecture? Or of both of them to be rather
free in the matter of using vases as projectiles? What, in short, is
vulgar?) I am far from quarreling with Mr Stearns’ leading idea, for
I am sure that a history of manners in the United States could be
composed with the comic strip as its golden thread; but I think that
something more than its vulgarity would be revealing.
The daily comic strip arrived in the early ’nineties--perhaps it was
our contribution to that artistic age--and has gone through several
phases. In 1892 or thereabouts Jimmy Swinnerton created _Little
Bears and Tigers_ for the San Francisco _Examiner_; that forerunner
has passed away, but Swinnerton remains, and everything he does is
observed with respect by the other comic-strip artists; he has had more
influence on the strip even than Wilhelm Busch, the German whose _Max
und Moritz_ were undoubtedly the originals of the _Katzenjammer Kids_.
The strip worked its way east, prospered by William Randolph Hearst
especially in the coloured Sunday Supplement, and as a daily feature
by the Chicago _Daily News_, which was, I am informed, the first to
syndicate its strips and so enabled Americans to think nationally.
About fifteen years ago, also in San Francisco, appeared the first work
of Bud Fisher, _Mr Mutt_, soon to develop into _Mutt and Jeff_, the
first of the great hits and still one of the best known of the comic
strips. Fisher’s arrival on the scene corresponds to that of Irving
Berlin in ragtime. He had a great talent, hit upon something which took
the popular fancy, and by his energy helped to establish the comic
strip as a fairly permanent idea in the American newspaper.
The files of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ will one day be searched by
an enthusiast for the precise date on which Little Jeff appeared in
the picture. It is generally believed that the two characters came on
together, but this is not so. In the beginning Mr Mutt made his way
alone; he was a race-track follower who daily went out to battle and
daily fell. Clare Briggs had used the same idea in his _Piker Clerk_
for the Chicago _Tribune_. The historic meeting with Little Jeff, a
sacred moment in our cultural development, occurred during the days
before one of Jim Jeffries’ fights. It was as Mr Mutt passed the asylum
walls that a strange creature confided to the air the notable remark
that he himself was Jeffries. Mutt rescued the little gentleman and
named him Jeff. In gratitude Jeff daily submits to indignities which
might otherwise seem intolerable.
The development in the last twenty years has been rapid, and about two
dozen good comics now exist. Historically it remains to be noted that
between 1910 and 1916 nearly all the good comics were made into bad
burlesque shows; in 1922 the best of them was made into a ballet with
scenario and music by John Alden Carpenter, choreography by Adolph
Bolm; costumes and settings after designs by George Herriman. Most
of the comics have also appeared in the movies; the two things have
much in common and some day a thesis for the doctorate in letters will
be written to establish the relationship. The writer of that thesis
will explain, I hope, why “movies” is a good word and “funnies,” as
offensive little children name the comic pages, is what charming
essayists call an atrocious vocable.
Setting apart the strip which has fantasy--it is practised by Frueh and
by Herriman--the most interesting form is that which deals satirically
with every-day life; the least entertaining is the one which takes over
the sentimental magazine love-story and carries it through endless
episodes. The degree of interest points to one of the virtues of the
comic strip: it is a great corrective to magazine-cover prettiness.
Only one or two frankly pretty-girl strips exist. _Petey_ is the only
one which owes its popularity to the high, handsome face and the
lovely flanks of its heroine, and even there the pompous awkwardness
of the persistent lover has a touch of wilful absurdity. Mrs Trubble,
a second-rate strip unworthy of its originator, is simply a series
of pictures dramatizing the vampire home-breaker; I am not even sure
she is intended to be pretty. When nearly everything else in the same
newspapers is given over to sentimentality and affected girl-worship,
to advice to the lovelorn and pretty-prettiness, it is notable that the
comic strip remains grotesque and harsh and careless. It is largely
concerned with the affairs of men and children, and, as far as I know,
there has never been an effective strip made by, for, or of a woman.
The strip has been from the start a satirist of manners; remembering
that it arrived at the same time as the Chicago World’s Fair, recalling
the clothes, table manners, and conversation of those days, it is easy
to see how the murmured satiric commentary of the strip undermined our
self-sufficiency, pricked our conceit, and corrected our _gaucherie_.
To-day the world of Tad, peopled with cake-eaters and finale-hoppers,
the world of the _Gumps_ and _Gasoline Alley_, of _Abie the Agent_ and
_Mr and Mrs_ serve the same purpose. I am convinced that none of our
realists in fiction come so close to the facts of the average man, none
of our satirists are so gentle and so effective. Of course they are all
more serious and more conscious of their mission; but--well, exactly
who cares?
[Illustration:
(_Copyright by the Star Company. By permission of the
publishers of the_ New York Journal)
MIKE AND MIKE. By T. E. Powers
]
The best of the realists is Clare Briggs, who is an elusive creator,
one who seems at times to feel the medium of the strip not exactly
suited to him, and at others to find himself at home in it. His
single pictures: _The Days of Real Sport_ and _When a Feller Needs
a Friend_, and the now rapidly disappearing _Kelly Pool_ which was
technically a strip, are notable recreations of simple life. Few of
them are actively funny; some are sentimental. The children of _The
Days of Real Sport_ have an astonishing reality--and none are more
real than the virtually unseen Skinnay, who is always being urged
to “come over.” They are a gallery of country types, some of them
borrowed from literature--the Huck Finn touch is visible--but all of
them freshly observed and dryly recorded. Briggs’ line is distinctive;
one could identify any square inch of his drawings. In _Kelly Pool_
he worked close to Tad’s _Indoor Sports_, and did what Tad hasn’t
done--created a character, the negro waiter George whom I shall be
sorry to lose. George’s amateur interest in pool was continually being
submerged in his professional interest: gettings tips, and his “Bad
day ... ba-a-ad day” when tips were low is a little classic. Deserting
that scene, Briggs has made a successful comedy of domestic life in
_Mr and Mrs_. No one has come so near to the subject--the grumbling,
helpless, assertive, modest, self-satisfied, self-deprecating male,
in his contacts with his sensible, occasionally irritable, wife. As
often as not these episodes end in quarrels--in utter blackness with
harsh bedroom voices continuing a day’s exacerbations; again the
reconciliations are mushy, again they are genuine sentiment. And
around them plays the child whose one function is to say “Papa loves
mamma” at the most appropriate time. It is quite an achievement, for
Briggs has made the ungrateful material interesting, and I can recall
not one of these strips in which he has cracked a joke. Tad here
follows Briggs, respectfully. _For Better or Worse_ is considerably
more obvious, but it has Tad’s special value, in sharpness of
caricature. The surrounding types are brilliantly drawn; only the
central characters remain stock figures. Yet the touch of romance
in Tad, continually overlaid by his sense of the ridiculous, is
precious; he seems aware of the faint aspirations of his characters
and recognizes the _rôles_ which they think they are playing while he
mercilessly shows up their actuality. The finest of the _Indoor Sports_
are those in which two subordinate characters riddle with sarcasm
the pretentions of the others--the clerk pretending to be at ease
when the boss brings his son into the office, the lady of the house
talking about the new motor car, the small-town braggart and the city
swell--characters out of melodrama, some, and others so vividly taken
from life that the very names Tad gives them pass into common speech.
He is an inveterate creator and manipulator of slang; whatever phrase
he makes or picks up has its vogue for months and his own variations
are delightful. Slang is a part of their picture, and he and Walter
Hoban are the only masters of it.
Ketten’s _Day of Rest_ is another strip of this _genre_, interesting
chiefly as a piece of draughtsmanship. He is the most economical of
the comic-strip artists, and his flat characters, without contours or
body, have a sort of jack-in-the-box energy and a sardonic obstinacy.
The Chicago School I have frankly never been able to understand--a
parochialism on my part, or a tribute to its exceptional privacy and
sophistication. It pretends, of course, to be simple, but the fate
of every metropolis is to enter its small-town period at one time or
another, to call itself a village, to build a town hall and sink a
town pump with a silver handle. The Gumps are common people and the
residents of Gasoline Alley are just folks, but I have never been able
to understand what they are doing; I suspect they do nothing. It seems
to me I read columns of conversation daily, and have to continue to the
next day to follow the story. The campaign of Andy Gump for election to
the Senate gave a little body to the serial story--he was so abysmally
the ignorant Congressman that he began to live. But apart from this,
apart from the despairing cry of “Oh, Min,” one recalls nothing of the
Chicago School except the amusing vocabulary of Syd Smith and that Andy
has no chin. It is an excellent symbol; but it isn’t enough for daily
food.
The small-town school of comic strip flourishes in the work of Briggs,
already mentioned, in Webster’s swift sketches of a similar nature,
and in Tom MacNamara’s _Us Boys_. The last of these is an exceptional
fake as small-town, but an amusing and genuine strip. It is people by
creation of fancy--the alarmingly fat, amiable Skinny, the truculent
Eaglebeak Spruder, the little high-brow Van with his innocence and his
spectacles, and Emily, if I recall the name, the village vampire at the
age of seven. Little happens in _Us Boys_, but MacNamara has managed to
convey a genuine emotion in tracing the complicated relations between
his personages--there is actual childhood friendship, actual worry and
pride and anger--all rather gently rendered, and with a recognizable
language.
It is interesting to note that none of these strips make use of the
projectile or the blow as a regular _dénoûement_. I have nothing
against the solution by violence of delicate problems, but since the
comic strip is supposed to be exclusively devoted to physical exploits
I think it is well to remark how placid life is in at least one
significant branch of the art. In effect all the themes of the comic
strip are subjected to a great variety of treatments, and in each of
them you will find, on occasions, the illustrated joke. This is the
weakest of the strips, and, as if aware of its weakness, its creators
give it the snap ending of a blow, or, failing that, show us one
character in consternation at the brilliance of the other’s wit, flying
out of the picture with the cry of “Zowie,” indicating his surcharge of
emotion. This is not the same thing as the wilful violence of _Mutt
and Jeff_, where the attack is due to the malice or stupidity of one
character, the resentment or revenge of the other.
Mutt is a _picaro_, one of the few rogues created in America. There is
nothing too dishonest for him, nor is there any chance so slim that
he won’t take it. He has an object in life: he does not do mean or
vicious things simply for the pleasure of doing them, and so is vastly
superior to the Peck’s Bad Boy type of strip which has an apparently
endless vogue--the type best known in _The Katzenjammer Kids_. This is
the least ingenious, the least interesting as drawing, the sloppiest
in colour, the weakest in conception and in execution, of all the
strips, and it is the one which has determined the intellectual idea
of what all strips are like. It is now divided into two--and they
are equally bad. How happy one could be with neither! The other
outstanding picaresque strip is _Happy Hooligan_--the type tramp--who
with his brother, Gloomy Gus, had added to the gallery of our national
mythology. _Non est qualis erat_--the spark has gone out of him in
recent years.[17] Elsewhere you still find that exceptionally immoral
and dishonest attitude toward the business standards of America. For
the comic strip, especially after you leave the domestic-relations
type which is itself realistic and unsentimental, is specifically
more violent, more dishonest, more tricky and roguish, than America
usually permits its serious arts to be. The strips of cleverness:
_Foxy Grandpa_, the boy inventor, _Hawkshaw the Detective_, haven’t
great vogue. _Boob McNutt_, without a brain in his head, beloved by
the beautiful heiress, has a far greater following, although it is
the least worthy of Rube Goldberg’s astonishing creations. But Mutt
and Jiggs and _Abie the Agent_, and _Barney Google_ and _Eddie’s
Friends_ have so little respect for law, order, the rights of property,
the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all the other
foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the
Society for the Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently
to court and our morals would be saved again.
_The Hall-room Boys_ (now known as _Percy and Ferdy_, I think) are
also picaresque; the indigent pretenders to social eminence who do
anything to get on. They are great bores, not because one foresees the
denunciation at the end, but because they somehow fail to come to life,
and one doesn’t care whether they get away with it or not.
_Abie_ and _Jerry on the Job_ are good strips because they are
self-contained, seldom crack jokes, and have each a significant touch
of satire. Abie is the Jew of commerce and the man of common sense; you
have seen him quarrel with a waiter because of an overcharge of ten
cents, and, encouraged by his companion, replying, “Yes, and it ain’t
the principle, either; it’s the ten cents.” You have seen a thousand
tricks by which he once sold Complex motor cars and now promotes cinema
shows or prize fights. He is the epitome of one side of his race, and
his attractiveness is as remarkable as his jargon. Jerry’s chief fault
is taking a stock situation and prolonging it; his chief virtue, at
the moment, is his funny, hard-boiled attitude towards business. Mr
Givney, the sloppy sentimentalist who is pleased because some one took
him for Mr Taft (“Nice, clean fun,” says Jerry of that), is faced with
the absurd Jerry, who demolishes efficiency systems and the romance of
big business and similar nonsense with his devastating logic or his
complete stupidity. The railway station at Ammonia hasn’t the immortal
character of _The Toonerville Trolley_ (that meets all the trains)
because Fontaine Fox has a far more entertaining manner than Hoban,
and because Fox is actually a caricaturist--all of his figures are
grotesque, the powerful _Katinka_ or _Aunt Eppie_ not more so than the
Skipper. Hoban and Hershfield both understate; Fox exaggerates grossly;
but with his exaggeration he is so ingenious, so inventive that each
strip is funny and the total effect is the creation of character in the
Dickens sense. It is not the method of _Mutt and Jeff_ nor of _Barney
Google_ in which Billy de Beck has done much with a luckless wight, a
sentimentalist, and an endearing fool all rolled into one.
These are the strips which come to life each day, without forcing,
and which stay long in memory. I am stating the case for the strip in
general and have gone so far as to speak well of some I do not admire,
nor read with animation. The continued existence of others remains
a mystery to me; why they live beyond change, and presumably beyond
accidental death, is one of the things no one can profitably speculate
upon. I do not see why I should concede anything more to the enemies
of the strip. In one of _Life’s_ burlesque numbers there was a page
of comics expertly done by j held in the manner of our most popular
artists. Each of the half dozen strips illustrated the joke: “Who was
that lady I seen you with on the street last night?” “That wasn’t a
lady; that was my wife.” Like so many parodies, this arrived too late,
for the current answer is, “That wasn’t a street; that was an alley.”
Each picture ended in a slam and a cry--also belated. The actual
demolition of the slam ending was accomplished by T. E. Powers, who
touches the field of the comic strip rarely, and then with his usual
ferocity. In a footnote to a cartoon he drew _Mike and Mike_. In six
pictures four represented one man hitting the other; once to emphasize
a pointless joke, twice thereafter for no reason at all, and finally to
end the picture. It was destruction by exaggeration; and no comic strip
artist missed the point.
At the extremes of the comic strip are the realistic school and the
fantastic--and of fantasy there are but few practitioners. Tad has
some of the quality in _Judge Rummy_, but for the most part the Judge
and Fedink and the rest are human beings dressed up as dogs--they
are out of Æsop, not out of LaFontaine. But the Judge is actually
funny, and I recall an inhuman and undoglike episode in which he and
Fedink each claimed to have the loudest voice, and so in midwinter,
in a restaurant, each lifted up his voice and uttered and shouted and
bellowed the word “Strawberries” until they were properly thrown into
the street. This is the kind of madness which is required in fantasy,
and Goldberg occasionally has it. He is the most versatile of the lot;
he has created characters, and scenes, and continuous episodes--foolish
questions and meetings of ladies’ clubs and inventions (not so good as
Heath Robinson’s) and through them there has run a wild grotesquerie.
The tortured statues of his _décors_ are marvelous, the way he pushes
stupidity and ugliness to their last possible point, and humour into
everything, is amazing. Yet I feel he is _manqué_, because he has never
found a perfect medium for his work.
Frueh is a fine artist in caricature and could have no such difficulty.
When he took it into his head to do a daily strip he was bound to do
something exceptional, and he succeeded. It is a highly sophisticated
thing in its humour, in its subjects, and pre-eminently in its
execution. His series on prohibition enforcement had infinite
ingenuity, so also his commentaries on political events in New York
city. He remains a caricaturist in these strips, indicating, by his use
of the medium, that its possibilities are not exhausted. Yet for all
his dealing with “ideas” his method remains fantastic, and although
he isn’t technically a comic-strip artist he is the best approach to
the one artist whom I have only mentioned, George Herriman, and to his
immortal creation. For there is, in and outside the comic strip, a
solitary and incomprehensible figure which must be treated apart. The
Krazy Kat that Walks by Himself.
[Illustration: HOW LONG SHALL THIS GO ON?
(_Courtesy of_ Life--_from the burlesque Sunday Supplement
Number_)
A CARTOON. By R. L. Goldberg
]
_The Krazy Kat That
Walks by Himself_
THE KRAZY KAT THAT WALKS BY HIMSELF
Krazy Kat, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the
most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in
America to-day. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work
of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and
fantasy--exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish _The Revolt
of the Angels_; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference
for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the
major arts. It happens that in America irony and fantasy are practised
in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash;
and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of
pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially
fine. It is the result of a naïve sensibility rather like that of the
_douanier_ Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a
thought-out, a constructed piece of work. In the second order of the
world’s art it is superbly first rate--and a delight! For ten years,
daily and frequently on Sunday, Krazy Kat has appeared in America; in
that time we have accepted and praised a hundred fakes from Europe and
Asia--silly and trashy plays, bad painting, woful operas, iniquitous
religions, everything paste and brummagem, has had its vogue with us;
and a genuine, honest native product has gone unnoticed until in the
year of grace 1922 a ballet brought it a tardy and grudging acclaim.
Herriman is our great master of the fantastic and his early career
throws a faint light on the invincible creation which is his present
masterpiece. For all of his other things were comparative failures. He
could not find, in the realistic framework he chose, an appropriate
medium for his imaginings, or even for the strange draughtsmanship
which is his natural mode of expression. _The Family Upstairs_ seemed
to the realist reader simply incredible; it failed to give him the
pleasure of recognizing his neighbours in their more ludicrous moments.
_The Dingbats_, hapless wretches, had the same defect. Another strip
came nearer to providing the right tone: _Don Koyote and Sancho Pansy_;
Herriman’s mind has always been preoccupied with the mad knight of
La Mancha, who reappears transfigured in _Krazy Kat_. And--although
the inspirations are _never_ literary--when it isn’t Cervantes it is
Dickens to whom he has the greatest affinity. The Dickens mode operated
in _Baron Bean_--a figure half Micawber, half Charlie Chaplin as man
of the world. I have noted, in writing of Chaplin, Mr Herriman’s acute
and sympathetic appreciation of the first few moments of _The Kid_. It
is only fair to say here that he had himself done the same thing in his
medium. Baron Bean was always in rags, penniless, hungry; but he kept
his man Grimes, and Grimes did his dirty work, Grimes was the Baron’s
outlet, and Grimes, faithful retainer, held by bonds of admiration
and respect, helped the Baron in his one great love affair. Like all
of Herriman’s people, they lived on the enchanted mesa (pronounced:
ma-cey) by Coconino, near the town of Yorba Linda. The Baron was
inventive; lacking the money to finance the purchase of a postage
stamp, he entrusted a love letter to a carrier pigeon; and his “Go, my
paloma,” on that occasion, is immortal.
Some of these characters are reappearing in Herriman’s latest work:
_Stumble Inn_. Of this I have not seen enough to be sure. It is a
mixture of fancy and realism; Mr Stumble himself is the Dickens
character again--the sentimental, endearing innkeeper who would
rather lose his only patron than kill a favourite turkey cock for
Thanksgiving. I have heard that recently a litter of pups has been
found in the cellar of the inn; so I should judge that fantasy has won
the day. For it is Herriman’s bent to disguise what he has to say in
creations of the animal world which are neither human nor animal, but
each _sui generis_.
That is how the Kat started. The thought of a friendship between a cat
and a mouse amused Herriman and one day he wrote them in as a footnote
to _The Family Upstairs_. On their first appearance they played marbles
while the family quarreled; and in the last picture the marble dropped
through a hole in the bottom line. An office boy named Willie was the
first to recognize the strange virtues of _Krazy Kat_. As surely as he
was the greatest of office boys, so the greatest of editors, Arthur
Brisbane, was the next to praise. He urged Herriman to keep the two
characters in action; within a week they began a semi-independent
existence in a strip an inch wide under the older strip. Slowly they
were detached, were placed at one side, and naturally stepped into
the full character of a strip when the _Family_ departed. In time the
Sundays appeared--three quarters of a page, involving the whole Krazy
Kat and Ignatz families[18] and the flourishing town of Coconino--the
flora and fauna of that enchanted region which Herriman created out of
his memories of the Arizona desert he so dearly loves.
In one of his most metaphysical pictures Herriman presents Krazy as
saying to Ignatz: “I ain’t a Kat ... and I ain’t Krazy” (I put dots
to indicate the lunatic shifting of background which goes on while
these remarks are made; although the action is continuous and the
characters motionless, it is in keeping with Herriman’s method to have
the backdrop in a continual state of agitation; you never know when a
shrub will become a redwood, or a hut a church) ... “it’s wot’s behind
me that I am ... it’s the idea behind me, ‘Ignatz’ and that’s wot I
am.” In an attitude of a contortionist Krazy points to the blank space
behind him, and it is there that we must look for the “Idea.” It is
not far to seek. There is a plot and there is a theme--and considering
that since 1913 or so there have been some three thousand strips, one
may guess that the variations are infinite. The plot is that Krazy
(androgynous, but according to his creator willing to be either) is in
love with Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz, who is married, but vagrant, despises
the Kat, and his one joy in life is to “Krease that Kat’s bean with a
brick” from the brickyard of Kolin Kelly. The fatuous Kat (Stark Young
has found the perfect word for him: he is crack-brained) takes the
brick, by a logic and a cosmic memory presently to be explained, as a
symbol of love; he cannot, therefore, appreciate the efforts of Offisa
B. Pupp to guard him and to entrammel the activities of Ignatz Mouse
(or better, Mice). A deadly war is waged between Ignatz and Offisa
Pupp--the latter is himself romantically in love with Krazy; and one
often sees pictures in which Krazy and Ignatz conspire together to
outwit the officer, both wanting the same thing, but with motives all
at cross-purposes. This is the major plot; it is clear that the brick
has little to do with the violent endings of other strips, for it is
surcharged with emotions. It frequently comes not at the end, but
at the beginning of an action; sometimes it does not arrive. It is a
symbol.
The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden Carpenter has pointed
out in the brilliant little foreword[19] to his ballet, that Krazy Kat
is a combination of Parsifal and Don Quixote, the perfect fool and the
perfect knight. Ignatz is Sancho Panza and, I should say, Lucifer.
He loathes the sentimental excursions, the philosophic ramblings of
Krazy; he interrupts with a well-directed brick the romantic excesses
of his companion. For example: Krazy blindfolded and with the scales
of Justice in his hand declares: “Things is all out of perpotion,
‘Ignatz.’” “In what way, fool?” enquires the Mice as the scene shifts
to the edge of a pool in the middle of the desert. “In the way of
‘ocean’ for a instinct.” “Well?” asks Ignatz. They are plunging head
down into mid-sea, and only their hind legs, tails, and words are
visible: “The ocean is so innikwilly distribitted.” They appear, each
prone on a mountain peak, above the clouds, and the Kat says casually
across the chasm to Ignatz: “Take ‘Denva, Kollorado’ and ‘Tulsa,
Okrahoma’ they ain’t got no ocean a tall--” (they are tossed by a vast
sea, together in a packing-case) “while Sem Frencisco, Kellafornia,
and Bostin, Messachoosit, has got more ocean than they can possibly
use”--whereon Ignatz properly distributes a brick evenly on Krazy’s
noodle. Ignatz “has no time” for foolishness; he is a realist and Sees
Things as They ARE. “I don’t believe in Santa Claus,” says he; “I’m too
broad-minded and advanced for such nonsense.”
But Mr Herriman, who is a great ironist, understands pity. It is the
destiny of Ignatz never to know what his brick means to Krazy. He does
not enter into the racial memories of the Kat which go back to the days
of Cleopatra, of the Bubastes, when Kats were held sacred. Then, on a
beautiful day, a mouse fell in love with Krazy, the beautiful daughter
of Kleopatra Kat; bashful, advised by a soothsayer to write his love,
he carved a declaration on a brick and, tossing the “missive,” was
accepted, although he had nearly killed the Kat. “When the Egyptian
day is done it has become the Romeonian custom to crease his lady’s
bean with a brick laden with tender sentiments ... through the tide of
dusty years” ... the tradition continues. But only Krazy knows this.
So at the end it is the incurable romanticist, the victim of acute
Bovaryisme, who triumphs; for Krazy faints daily in full possession
of his illusion, and Ignatz, stupidly hurling his brick, thinking to
injure, fosters the illusion and keeps Krazy “heppy.”
Not always, to be sure. Recently we beheld Krazy smoking an “eligint
Hawanna cigar” and sighing for Ignatz; the smoke screen he produced hid
him from view when Ignatz passed, and before the Mice could turn back,
Krazy had handed over the cigar to Offisa Pupp and departed, saying
“Looking at ‘Offisa Pupp’ smoke himself up like a chimly is werra werra
intrisking, but it is more wital that I find ‘Ignatz’”--wherefore
Ignatz, thinking the smoke screen a ruse, hurls his brick, blacks the
officer’s eye, and is promptly chased by the limb of the law. Up to
this point you have the usual technique of the comic strip, as old
as Shakespeare. But note the final picture of Krazy beholding the
pursuit, himself disconsolate, unbricked, alone, muttering: “Ah, there
him is--playing tag with ‘Offisa Pupp’--just like the boom compenions
wot they is.” It is this touch of irony and pity which transforms
all of Herriman’s work, which relates it, for all that the material
is preposterous, to something profoundly true and moving. It isn’t
possible to retell these pictures; but that is the only way, until
they are collected and published, that I can give the impression of
Herriman’s gentle irony, of his understanding of tragedy, of the
_sancta simplicitas_, the innocent loveliness in the heart of a
creature more like Pan than any other creation of our time.
Given the general theme, the variations are innumerable, the ingenuity
never flags. I use haphazard examples from 1918 to 1923, for though the
Kat has changed somewhat since the days when he was even occasionally
feline, the essence is the same. Like Charlot, he was always living in
a world of his own, and subjecting the commonplaces of actual life
to the test of his higher logic. Does Ignatz say that “the bird is
on the wing,” Krazy suspects an error and after a careful scrutiny
of bird life says that “from rissint obserwation I should say that
the wing is on the bird.” Or Ignatz observes that Don Kiyote is still
running. Wrong, says the magnificent Kat: “he is either still or either
running, but not both still and both running.” Ignatz passes with a bag
containing, he says, bird-seed. “Not that I doubt your word, Ignatz,”
says Krazy, “but could I give a look?” And he is astonished to find
that it is bird-seed, after all, for he had all the time been thinking
that birds grew from eggs. It is Ignatz who is impressed by a falling
star; for Krazy “them that don’t fall” are the miracle. I recommend
Krazy to Mr Chesterton, who, in his best moments, will understand.
His mind is occupied with eternal oddities, with simple things to
which his nature leaves him unreconciled. See him entering a bank and
loftily writing a check for thirty million dollars. “You haven’t that
much money in the bank,” says the cashier. “I know it,” replies Krazy;
“have you?” There is a drastic simplicity about Krazy’s movements; he
is childlike, regarding with grave eyes the efforts of older people to
be solemn, to pretend that things are what they seem; and like children
he frightens us because none of our pretensions escapes him. A king to
him is a “royal cootie.” “Golla,” says he, “I always had a ida they
was grend, and megnifishint, and wondafil, and mejestic ... but my
goodniss! It ain’t so.” He should be given to the _enfant terrible_ of
Hans Andersen who knew the truth about kings.
He is, of course, blinded by love. Wandering alone in springtime, he
suffers the sight of all things pairing off; the solitude of a lonesome
pine worries him and when he finds a second lonesome pine he comes in
the dead of night and transplants one to the side of the other, “so
that in due course, Nature has her way.” But there are moments when
the fierce pang of an unrequited passion dies down. “In these blissfil
hours my soul will know no strife,” he confides to Mr Bum Bill Bee,
who, while the conversation goes on, catches sight of Ignatz with a
brick, flies off, stings Ignatz from the field, and returns to hear:
“In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord ... all my immotions
will function in hominy and kind feelings.” Or we see him at peace with
Ignatz himself. He has bought a pair of spectacles, and seeing that
Ignatz has none, cuts them in two, so that each may have a monocle. He
is gentle, and gentlemanly, and dear; and these divagations of his are
among his loveliest moments; for when irony plays about him he is as
helpless--as we are.
[Illustration:
(_Copyright by The Star Company_)
FRAGMENT FROM THE KRAZY KAT OF THE DOOR. By George Herriman.
(The original, of which this reproduces only the central
episodes, is in colour. Cf. text, page 244.)
]
To put such a character into music was a fine thought, but Mr
Carpenter must have known that he was foredoomed to failure. It
was a notable effort, for no other of our composers had seen the
possibilities; most, I fear, did not care to “lower themselves”
by the association. Mr Carpenter caught much of the fantasy; it was
exactly right for him to make the opening a parody--The Afternoon Nap
of a Faun. The “Class A Fit,” the Katnip Blues were also good. (There
exists a Sunday Krazy of this very scene--it is 1919, I think, and
shows hundreds of Krazy Kats in a wild abandoned revel in the Katnip
field--a rout, a bacchanale, a satyr-dance, an erotic festival, with
our own Krazy playing the viola in the corner, and Ignatz, who has
been drinking, going to sign the pledge.) Mr Carpenter almost missed
one essential thing: the ecstasy of Krazy when the brick arrives at
the end; certainly, as Mr Bolm danced it one felt only the triumph
of Ignatz, one did not feel the grand leaping up of Krazy’s heart,
the fulfilment of desire, as the brick fell upon him. The irony was
missing. And it was a mistake for Bolm to try it, since it isn’t
Russian ballet Krazy requires; it is American dance. One man, one man
only can do it right, and I publicly appeal to him to absent him from
felicity awhile, and though he do it but once, though but a small
number of people may see it, to pay tribute to his one compeer in
America, to the one creation equalling his own--I mean, of course,
Charlie Chaplin. He has been urged to do many things hostile to his
nature; here is one thing he is destined to do. Until then the ballet
ought to have Johnny and Ray Dooley for its creators. And I hope that
Mr Carpenter hasn’t driven other composers off the subject. There is
enough there for Irving Berlin and Deems Taylor to take up. Why don’t
they? The music it requires is a jazzed tenderness--as Mr Carpenter
knew. In their various ways Berlin and Taylor could accomplish it.
They may not be able to write profoundly in the private idiom of Krazy.
I have preserved his spelling and the quotations have given some sense
of his style. The accent is partly Dickens and partly Yiddish--and
the rest is not to be identified, for it is Krazy. It was odd that in
_Vanity Fair’s_ notorious “rankings,” Krazy tied with Doctor Johnson,
to whom he owes much of his vocabulary. There is a real sense of the
colour of words and a high imagination in such passages as “the echoing
cliffs of Kaibito” and “on the north side of ‘wild-cat peak’ the ‘snow
squaws’ shake their winter blankets and bring forth a chill which rides
the wind with goad and spur, hurling with an icy hand rime, and frost
upon a dreamy land musing in the lap of Spring”; and there is the
rhythm of wonder and excitement in “Ooy, ‘Ignatz’ it’s awfil; he’s got
his legs cut off above his elbows, and he’s wearing shoes, and he’s
standing on top of the water.”
Nor, even with Mr Herriman’s help, will a ballet get quite the sense of
his shifting backgrounds. He is alone in his freedom of movement; in
his large pictures and small, the scene changes at will--it is actually
our one work in the expressionistic mode. While Krazy and Ignatz talk
they move from mountain to sea; or a tree stunted and flattened with
odd ornaments of spots or design, grows suddenly long and thin; or
a house changes into a church. The trees in this enchanted mesa are
almost always set in flower pots with Coptic and Egyptian designs in
the foliage as often as on the pot. There are adobe walls, fantastic
cactus plants, strange fungus and growths. And they _compose designs_.
For whether he be a primitive or an expressionist, Herriman is an
artist; his works are built up; there is a definite relation between
his theme and his structure, and between his lines, masses, and his
page. His masterpieces in colour show a new delight, for he is as naïve
and as assured with colour as with line or black and white. The little
figure of Krazy built around the navel, is amazingly adaptable, and
Herriman economically makes him express all the emotions with a turn of
the hand, a bending of that extraordinary starched bow he wears round
the neck, or with a twist of his tail.
And he has had much to express for he has suffered much. I return to
the vast enterprises of the Sunday pictures. There is one constructed
entirely on the bias. Ignatz orders Krazy to push a huge rock off
its base, then to follow it downhill. Down they go, crashing through
houses, uprooting trees, tearing tunnels through mountains, the bowlder
first, Krazy so intently after that he nearly crashes into it when it
stops. He toils painfully back uphill. “Did it gather any moss?” asks
Ignatz. “No.” “That’s what I thought.” “L’il fillossiffa,” comments
Krazy, “always he seeks the truth, and always he finds it.” There is
the great day in which Krazy hears a lecture on the ectoplasm, how “it
soars out into the limitless ether, to roam willy-nilly, unleashed,
unfettered, and unbound” which becomes for him: “Just imegine having
your ‘ectospasm’ running around, William and Nilliam, among the
unlimitliss etha--golla, it’s imbillivibil--” until a toy balloon,
which looks like Ignatz precipitates a heroic gesture and a tragedy.
And there is the greatest of all, the epic, the Odyssean wanderings of
the door:
Krazy beholds a dormouse, a little mouse with a huge door. It impresses
him as being terrible that “a mice so small, so dellikit” should carry
around a door so heavy with weight. (At this point their Odyssey
begins; they use the door to cross a chasm.) “A door is so useless
without a house is hitched to it.” (It changes into a raft and they go
down stream.) “It has no ikkinomikil value.” (They dine off the door.)
“It lecks the werra werra essentials of helpfilniss.” (It shelters them
from a hailstorm.) “Historically it is all wrong and misleading.” (It
fends the lightning.) “As a thing of beauty it fails in every rispeck.”
(It shelters them from the sun and while Krazy goes on to deliver a
lecture: “You never see Mr Steve Door, or Mr Torra Door, or Mr Kuspa
Door doing it, do you?” and “Can you imagine my li’l friends Ignatz
Mice boddering himself with a door?”) his li’l friend Ignatz has
appeared with the brick; unseen by Krazy he hurls it; it is intercepted
by the door, rebounds, and strikes Ignatz down. Krazy continues his
adwice until the dormouse sheers off, and then Krazy sits down to
“concentrate his mind on Ignatz and wonda where he is at.”
[Illustration:
(_Courtesy of the artist and the_ New York American)
KRAZY KAT. By George Herriman
]
Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on
having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich
with something we have too little of--fantasy. It is wise with pitying
irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The
strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal,
the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery
foam--all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most
tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new
mythology.
_The Damned Effrontery
of the Two-a-Day_
THE DAMNED EFFRONTERY OF THE TWO-A-DAY
The narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New
York _Tribune_; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield
is Richard himself again, the actor who played _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_
better than Thomas E. Shea did:
“As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield
turned to me and with venomous indignation said, ‘That is damned
effrontery!’ It seemed to be Mr Mansfield’s belief that mere dancers
had no right to wear the vestments of refined society.”
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.
[Illustration:
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.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration:
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]
[Illustration:
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.
[Illustration: FRANCESCO]
The Cirque Medrano is a one-ring circus in a permanent building near
the Place Pigalle; ten times a week it fills the vast saucer of its
seating capacity at an absurdly low price--the most expensive seats,
I believe, are six francs--and presents something a little above the
average European circus bill. There are more riding and a few more
stunts than at others, and there are less trained animals. And ten
times weekly the entire audience shouts with gratification as Francesco
Fratellini steps gracefully over the ring, hesitates, retreats, and
finally sits down in a ringside seat and begins a conversation with the
lady sitting beside him.
[Illustration: PAOLO]
The thing which distinguishes the Fratellini and makes them great is a
sort of internal logic in everything they do. When the spangled figure
with the white-washed face sits down by the ring and chats a moment
it is merely disconcerting; at once the logic appears--he is waiting
for the show to begin. An attendant approaches and tells him to stop
stalling, that the people are waiting to be amused. He replies in an
odd English that he has paid his “mawney” and why doesn’t the show
begin. Promptly another attendant repeats the message of the first in
English; Francesco replies in Italian. By the time the process has
been gone through in five languages the clown has changed his tack
entirely; you realize that since he doesn’t understand what all these
uniformed attendants are saying to him, he thinks that _they_ are the
show and he is trying to conceal his own irritation at being made the
object of their addresses and at the same time he is pretending to be
amused at their antics. The last time he speaks in what seems to be
gibberish (it is credibly reported to be rather fair Turkish) and the
attendants fall back. From the opposite entrance to the ring arrives
a figure of unparalleled grotesqueness--garments vast and loose in
unexpected places, monstrous shoes, squares like windowpanes over
his eyes, a glowing and preposterous nose. His gait is of the utmost
dignity, he senses the situation and advances to Francesco’s seat; and
as a pure matter of business he delivers a terrific slap, bows nobly,
and departs. Francesco enters the ring. At the same time a third figure
appears--a bald-headed man in carefully arranged clothes, a monocle,
and a high hat, a stick. The three Fratellini are on the scene.[25]
[Illustration: ALBERTO]
It is impossible to say what happens there, for the Fratellini have an
inexhaustible repertoire. The materials are always of the simplest,
and the effects, too; they have hardly any “props,” the costumes, the
smiles, the movements, the gestures, are almost exactly alike from
day to day. Much of their material is old, for they are the sons and
grandsons of clowns as far back as their family memory can carry; I
have seen them once appear armed for a fight with inflated bladders,
looking precisely like contemporary pictures in Maurice Sand’s book
about the _commedia dell’arte_, and on another occasion have seen them
so carried away with the frenzy of their activity that they actually
improvised and proved their descent from this ancient form. They do
burlesque sketches--a barber shop, a bull fight, a human elephant, a
magician, or a billiard game; the moment they stop the entire audience
roars for “la musique,” the most famous of their acts, remarkable
because it has a minimum of physical violence.
_La Musique_ is all a matter of construction and is a wonderful example
of the use of material. For at bottom it consists of the efforts of
two men to play a serenade and the continual intrusion of a third.
Francesco and Paolo arrive, each carrying a guitar or a mandoline, and
place two chairs close together exactly in the centre of the ring.
They step on the chairs and prepare to sit on the backs, but even this
simple process is difficult for them, as neither is willing to sit
down before the other, nor to remain seated while the other is still
erect, and they must be continually rising and apologizing until one
flings the other down and keeps him there until he himself is seated.
Ready then, they blow out the electric lights and strike the first
notes; but the spotlight deserts them; they are left in the dark and
puzzled; they regard one another with dismay and suspicion. Suddenly
they see it across the ring and, descending with great gravity, carry
their chairs across. Again they start, and again the spotlight goes;
their irritation mounts, but their dignity remains and they follow it.
It flits back to where they had come from. There is a consultation and
the two chairs are returned to their original place in the centre of
the ring. Then the two musicians take off their coats, prowl around the
ring stalking the light, and fall upon it; then slowly and with much
labour they lift the light by its edges and carefully carry it back
to their chairs. And as they begin to play the grotesque marches in
behind them, unconscious of them, intent only upon his vast horn and
the enormous musical score he carries. Unseeing and unseen, he prepares
himself, and at about the tenth bar the great bray of his horn shatters
the melody of the strings. The two musicians are dismayed, but as they
cannot see the source of the disturbance, they try again; again the
horn intrudes. This time there is expostulation and argument with the
grotesque, but, as he reasonably points out, music was desired and he
is doing his share. There is only one issue for such a scene, and it
takes place, in a riot.
[Illustration: THE FRATELLINI. By Fernand Leger]
The preparation of these riots is a work of real delicacy, for the
Fratellini know that two things are equally true: violence is funny
and violence ceases to be funny. Like Chaplin, they infuse into
their violence the sense of reason--they are violent only when no
other means will suffice. In the photographer scene they call into
action the “august” a stock character of the European circus, played
at the Medrano with exceptional skill by M Lucien Godart. The august
is a man of great dignity whose office it is to parley with clowns,
be the butt of their jokes, and in M Godart’s version, set off their
grotesque appearance by an excellent figure and the most correct of
evening clothes. (He is in addition a rather good tumbler, and it is
part of the Medrano tradition for the audience to hiss him until he
grows seemingly furious and turns twenty difficult somersaults around
the ring.) The Fratellini, armed with a huge black box and a cloth,
ask him to sit for his photograph. Francesco takes it upon himself to
explain the apparatus, Paolo standing close by with the three fence
posts which represent the tripod, and Alberto, the grotesque waiting
near by. Suddenly the tripod falls on Alberto’s feet and he howls
with pain; Paolo picks the posts up again, and again they fall, and
again he howls. It is unbelievable that this should be funny, yet
it is funny beyond any capacity to describe it for one reason which
the spectator senses long before he sees it. That is that the tripod
is not intentionally thrown on the feet of the grotesque. The fault
is Francesco’s, for he is explaining the machine and making serious
errors, and every time he makes a mistake Paolo gets excited and
forgets that he has the tripod in his hand, and simply lets it drop.
One senses his acute regret, and at the next moment one realizes that
his scientific zeal, his respect for his profession of photographer,
simply does not permit him to let a misstatement pass; his gesture as
he turns to set the matter right is so eager, so agonized, that one
doesn’t see what has happened to the tripod until it has fallen. And
to point the moral of the matter, when the grotesque Alberto after the
fifth time picks the tripod up and attempts to slay Paolo, Paolo is
again turning toward the others and the blow goes wide.
What the Fratellini are doing here is, to be sure, what every great
actor does--they are presenting their effects indirectly. The
difficulty for them is that in the end they must give their effects
with the maximum of directness--they have to strike a man in the face
and make the sound tell. In the scene of the photograph the august is
“he who gets slapped” (the phrase is a common one) and the scene is
carefully built up through his reluctance and stupidity in posing. At
first it is only an exaggeration of the customary difficulties between
a photographer and a little child; but as the august becomes more and
more suspicious of the intentions of the photographer, the clowns
become more and more insistent that he, and nobody but he, shall have
his picture taken. Gradually an atmosphere of hostility is built up;
the august tries to escape from the ring and is hauled back; then
dragged, then forced to sit; the opposing wills grow more and more
violent; the audience senses the good will of the clowns, the obstinacy
of the august; not a push or shove is given without reason and meaning.
And when they see that there is nothing else for it, the three hurl
themselves upon the clown in a frenzy of destructiveness and he is rent
limb from limb. (In actual fact only his exquisite evening clothes were
rent, but the effect is the same.)
In these scenes and almost all their others, the Fratellini escape
the reproach of being nothing but violent, while they hold every good
element which violence in action can give them. To them are comparable
the best (and only the best) of Eddie Cantor’s scenes--when he applied
for the job of policeman and when he was examined for the army--where
there is a play of motive and a hidden logic. In their world everything
must be sensible, and the most sensible thing in the world is to
hit out. Behind them is a dual tradition--centuries of laughter and
centuries of refining the instruments by which simple laughter can be
produced. For it is opposed to their sense of fitness (as it is to
ours) that the clown should create an effect of subtlety.[26] The kind
of laughter they produce _must_ involve the whole body, but not the
mind. They have to be active all the time, so that you are dazzled and
cannot think; and they must shake the solid ground under your feet, so
that you may shake with laughter. What the critical observer discovers
as method must reach the actual average spectator only as effect.
All of this the Fratellini have accomplished--“these three brothers
who constitute one artist” are the complete and perfect exemplars of
their art. Seeing them sometimes twice a week, and nearly two dozen
times, I find their qualities inexhaustible. Even in the descriptions
of acts noted above it can be seen that they have a definite sense of
pace; their changes from fast to slow in the middle of an act, their
variations from violence to trickery, their complete mastery of climax,
their fertility of invention, are all elements of superiority. But they
are only elements in a composition based on something fundamentally
right--the knowledge that we have almost forgotten how to laugh in the
actual world, and that to make us laugh again they must create a world
of their own.
_The Great God Bogus_
THE GREAT GOD BOGUS
If there were an Academy I should nail upon its doors the following
beliefs:
That Al Jolson is more interesting to the intelligent mind than
John Barrymore and Fanny Brice than Ethel;
That Ring Lardner and Mr Dooley in their best work are more
entertaining and more important than James B. Cabell and Joseph
Hergesheimer in their best;
That the daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is
easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of
art produced in America to-day;
That Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than David Belasco;
That one film by Mack Sennett or Charlie Chaplin is worth the
entire _œuvre_ of Cecil de Mille;
That _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and _I Love a Piano_ are
musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than _Indian
Love Lyrics_ and _The Rosary_;
That the circus can be and often is more artistic than the
Metropolitan Opera House in New York;
That Irene Castle is worth all the pseudo-classic dancing ever
seen on the American stage; and
That the civic masque is not perceptibly superior to the Elks’
Parade in Atlantic City.
Only about half of these are heresies, and I am quite ready to stand by
them as I would stand by my opinion of Dean Swift or Picasso or Henry
James or James Joyce or Johann Sebastian Bach. But I recognize that
they are expressions of personal preference, and possibly valueless
unless related to some general principles. It appears that what I care
for in the catalogue above falls in the field of the lively arts;
and that the things to which I compare them (for emphasis, not for
measurement) are either second-rate instances of the major arts or
first-rate examples of the peculiarly disagreeable thing for which I
find no other name than the bogus. I shall arrive presently at the
general principles of the lively arts and their relation to the major.
The bogus is a lion in the path.
Bogus is counterfeit and counterfeit is bad money and bad money
is better--or at least more effective--than good money. This is
not a private paradox, but a plain statement of a law in economics
(Gresham’s, I think) that unless it is discovered, bad money will drive
out good. Another characteristic of counterfeit is that, once we have
accepted it, we try to pass it off on some one else; banks and critics
are the only institutions which don’t--or ought not to--continue the
circulation. In the arts counterfeit is known as _faux bon_--the
apparently good, essentially bad, which is the enemy of the good.
The existence of the bogus is not a serious threat against the great
arts, for they have an obstinate vitality and in the end--but only
in the end--they prevail. It is the lively arts which are continually
jeopardized by the bogus, and it is for their sake that I should like
to see the bogus go sullenly down into oblivion.
Namely: vocal concerts, pseudo-classic dancing, the serious
intellectual drama, the civic masque, the high-toned moving picture,
and grand opera.
The first thing about them is that a very small percentage of those
who make the bogus arts prosperous really enjoy them. I recall my own
complete stultification after hearing my first concert; and the casual
way in which I made it evident to all my companions that I had been to
a concert is my only clue to the mystery. For at bottom there is a vast
snobbery of the intellect which repays the deadly hours of boredom we
spend in the pursuit of art. We are the inheritors of a tradition that
what is worth while must be dull; and as often as not we invert the
maxim and pretend that what is dull is higher in quality, more serious,
“greater art” in short than whatever is light and easy and gay. We
suffer fools gladly if we can pretend they are mystics. And the fact
that audiences at concerts and opera, spectators at classic dances and
masques, are suffering, is the final damnation, for it means that these
arts are failures. I do not found my belief on any theory that all the
arts ought to be appreciated by all the people. I do mean that most
of those who read _Ulysses_ or _The Pickwick Papers_ do so because
they enjoy it, and they stop the moment they are bored. There is no
superiority in having read a book. The lively anticipation of delights
which one senses in those going to the _Follies_ or to a circus is
wholly absent in the lobby of the Metropolitan or at a performance of
_Jane Clegg_. And the art which communicates no ecstasy but that of
snobbism is irretrievably bogus.
There is something hopeless about opera as we know it in the United
States; and the fact that ten or fifteen operas are among the permanent
delights of civilized existence does not alter the fact. (Three of
them: _Chovanstchina_, _The Marriage of Figaro_, and _Don Giovanni_,
are not in the repertoire of the Metropolitan; nor are _Falstaff_
and _Otello_; nor does the ballet proceed beyond _Coq d’Or_; nor it
seems would the Metropolitan hold it within its dignity to produce
_The Mikado_, although Schumann-Heink was ready to sing Katisha.)
Here is an art-form hundreds of years old, prospered by an enormous
publicity, favoured by extraordinary windfalls--the voice of Caruso,
the “personality” of Farrar--able to set into motion nearly every
appeal to the senses in colour, tone, movement--it has song and action
and dance--and what exactly is the final accomplishment? The pale
maunderings of Puccini, the vulgarity of Massenet, and the overpowering
dulness of our domestic try-outs. Wagner? A philosopher drunk with
divine wisdom is reported (by Goethe) to have cried out that he could
discern shortcomings even in God; and the melancholy truth is that the
welding of three arts into one succeeded only in Wagner’s brain, for on
the boards we lose Wagner as we attend to the stage, and regain him as
we return to the music. This is not true of _Boris_ or of _Figaro_--so
much less pretentious, both; and the director may arise who will know
how to fuse Wagner into one harmonious and beautiful object. At the
moment, one takes the Metropolitan with its vast seating capacity,
its endless sources of appeal to the multitude, and one knows that it
isn’t a success. If it isn’t losing money it is paying its way through
social subventions. Eighty per cent of the music heard there is trivial
in comparison with either good jazz or good symphonic music; ninety
per cent of the acting is preposterous; and the settings, costumes,
and properties are so far below popular musical comedy standards
that in the end Urban and Norman-Bel Geddes have had to be called
in to save them, and haven’t been given scope or freedom enough to
succeed. The Metropolitan is, I am told, the finest opera house in
the world and loses money because it is still several leaps ahead of
its clientèle which insists on more Puccini and no _Coq d’Or_. Also
I have had the supreme pleasure of hearing Chaliapin there and I am
not ungrateful. The Metropolitan has difficulties happily unknown to
us and is unquestionably an eminent institution. It is opera as we
know it, that calls down the curse, opera which has to call itself
“grand” to distinguish itself from the popular, superior, kind. For
it is pretentious and it appeals not to our sensibilities but to our
snobbery. It neither excites nor exalts; it does not amuse. Over it and
under it and through it runs the element of fake; it is a substitute
for symphonic music and an easy expiatory offering for ragtime.
_Ecrasez l’infâme!_
Audiences at the opera have, however, been thrilled by a voice. What
is there to say for the uncommunicative, uninspired, serious-minded
intellectual drama which without wit, or intensity, “presents a
problem” or drearily holds the mirror up to nature? Those little
scenes from domestic life, those second-hand expositions of other
people’s philosophies, those unflinching grapplings with “the vital
facts of existence” which year by year are held to be great plays?
Let me be frank; let me face my vital facts. I have never found my
brain inadequate to grapple with their grapplings, for it is almost
in the nature of the case that if a man has anything profound to
express he will flee from the theatre where everything is dependent
upon actors usually unintelligent and is reduced to the lowest
common factor of human intelligence. Bernard Shaw writes his ideas
into his prefaces because they can’t be fully stated on the stage;
Henry James tried to be delicate and failed. It remains for Ferencz
Molnar and Augustus Thomas to succeed--with borrowed and diminished
ideas. Still speaking of modern serious plays (because the _Medea_
of Euripides and the tragedy of _Othello_ are not involved) what is
bogus in them is their spurious appeal to our sentimentality or our
snobbery. It is their pretence to be a great and serious art when they
are simply vulgarizations. I have no quarrel with any man for the
subject matter of his work of art, and I should allow every freedom
to the artist. The whole trouble with our modern serious drama is
that it is usually such bad drama; the tedium of three hours of _Jane
Clegg_ isn’t worthy sitting through because of the desperate effort
of the dramatist and the producer to create the illusion of reality
by reproducing the rhythm of reality. The essential distortion,
caricature, or transposition which you find in a serious work of art or
in a vaudeville sketch, is missing here. And the efforts to ram this
sort of play home by pretending that only morons do not like it is
exactly and precisely bunk. Most plays fail because they are bad plays;
and the greater part of the intellectual drama following this divine
LAW, fails. A good manipulator of the theatre like Molnar can put
over _Liliom_, which has no more of a great idea than _Seven Keys to
Baldpate_ and is almost as good drama, if he knows in what proportion
to mingle his approaches to our meaner and higher sensibilities. For we
are not altogether lost yet.
If the civic masque and classic dancing continue much longer we will be
lost entirely. These arty conglomerations of middle-high seriousness
and bourgeois beauty are not so much a peril as a nuisance. The former
is the “artistic” counterpart of the Elks Parade and since I cannot
speak with decent calm about its draperies and mummery, I recommend
Mr R. C. Benchley’s chapter on the same subject in _Of All Things!_
The civic masque is fake mediævalism, the sort of thing which, if
ridicule could kill, should have gone out after W. S. Gilbert’s
couplets appeared in _Patience_. Alas the instinct for trumpery art
persists and on it has been grafted the astounding idea of communal
artistic effort--a characteristic thing, too, for the communal efforts
of ancient Greece were war and Bacchanalia, and of the middle ages,
the crusades; the municipal celebrations after which the civic masque
is patterned were created in cities which were unself-conscious and
were doing something out of vanity and joy. I cannot imagine the six
million of New York or the six thousand of Vineland, Arkansas, growing
suddenly mad with joy over the fact that they live in no mean city. I
neither like the civic consciousness nor believe deeply in its honest
existence. And when it takes to expressing itself as the symbol of the
corn and such-like idiocy it isn’t as funny as the induction scene of
the Ziegfeld Follies (which the Forty-niners took off as “I am the
spirit of Public School Number 146”) and it isn’t any more moving or
intelligent. Certainly it has never been so beautiful. Faced with the
vast myths of the American pasts, our poets simply haven’t found the
medium for projecting them. The dime novel and the Wild West film
both failed for lack of imaginative power, and that treasure remains
undisturbed. It is sealed and guarded and the civic masque nibbles
at it, dislodges a fragment, and comes dancing awkwardly into the
foreground waving the shadow of an illusion like a scarf over its head.
For obviously classic dancing is the natural form of expression for
this pseudo-civism. I have never had the patience to discover the
beginnings of the fatuous craze for imitations of presumably ancient
dances. Certainly the first of the notable dancers I saw was not before
1907--in the person of Isadora Duncan. It would be absurd to recall
those renditions of the _Seventh Symphony_ and what not at this date.
If Miss Duncan is a great artist and a great personality now, so much
the better, for her early success had much to do with breaking down
the gates of our decent objection to fake and her imitators swept
over us like a flood. Bogus again, these things; they interpret in
dance things which had already been all too clear in music or drama.
They know, it seems, the science of eurhythmics, which ought to mean
good rhythm, and they employ it to produce in pantomime an obvious,
brutally flat version of the Fall of Troy. They haven’t as yet added
one single thing to our stock of interest and beauty--as the Russian
Ballet did, as the old five-position ballet dance did, as modern
ballroom and stage dancing does. The costuming is almost always silly;
the music chosen is almost always obvious; and the postures assumed are
lethally monotonous. The old ballet, based on five definite positions,
made each slight variation count, and Pavlowa with her stricken face
and tenderness of movement knew it by heart, or by instinct. The new
dancers have no internal discipline and no freedom; and only the
accident that the human body is at times not displeasing to look upon
makes them tolerable. One could forgive them much if the pretensions
were not so unutterably lofty and the swank so ignorant and the results
so ugly. Fat women leaping with chaplets in their hair, in garments
of grey gauze, are not the poetry of motion, and Irene Castle in a
black evening dress dancing Irving Berlin’s music is--just as surely
as Nijinsky was. What is more, these two dancers, whom I choose at the
extremes of the dance, both have reference to our contemporary life;
and the classic dancing of Helen Moeller and Marion Morgan and Mr
Chalif and the rest have absolutely nothing to say to us. We’ve lost
that “simplicity,” thank God, or haven’t found it yet. We are an alert
and lively people--and our dance must actually express that spirit as
no fake can do.
Our existence is hard, precise, high spirited. There is no nourishment
for us in the milk-and-water diet of the bogus arts, and all they
accomplish is a genteel corruption, a further thinning out of
the blood, a little extra refinement. They are, intellectually,
the exact equivalent of a high-toned lady, an elegant dinner or a
refined collation served in the saloon, and the contemporary form of
the vapours. Everything about them is supposed to be “good taste,”
including the kiss on the brow which miraculously “ruins” a perfect
virgin--and they are in the physical sense of the word utterly
tasteless. The great arts and the lively arts have their sources in
strength or in gaiety--and the difference between them is not the
degree of intensity, but the degree of intellect. But the bogus arts
spring from longing and weakness and depression.[27] A happy people
creates folk songs or whistles rag; it does not commit the vast
atrocity of a “community sing-song”; it goes to Olympic games or to a
race track, to _Iphigenia_ or to Charlie Chaplin--not to hear a “vocal
concert.”
The bogus arts are corrupting the lively ones--because an essential
defect of the bogus is that they pretend to be better than the popular
arts, yet they want desperately to be popular. They borrow and spoil
what is good; they persuade people by appealing to their snobbery
that they are the real thing. And as the audience watches these arts
in action the comforting illusion creeps over them that at last they
have achieved art. But they are really watching the manifestations
of the Great God Bogus--and what annoys me most is that they might
at that very moment be hailing Apollo or Dionysos, or be themselves
participating in some of the minor rites of the Great God Pan.
_An Open Letter to the
Movie Magnates_
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOVIE MAGNATES
IGNORANT AND UNHAPPY PEOPLE:
The Lord has brought you into a narrow place--what you would call a
tight corner--and you are beginning to feel the pressure. A voice is
heard in the land saying that your day is over. The name of the voice
is Radio, broadcasting nightly to announce that the unequal struggle
between the tired washerwoman and the captions written by or for Mr
Griffith is ended. It is easier to listen than to read. And it is long
since you have given us anything significant to see.
You may say that radio will ruin the movies no more than the movies
ruined the theatre. The difference is that your foundation is insecure:
you are monstrously over-capitalized and monstrously undereducated; the
one thing you cannot stand is a series of lean years. You have to keep
on going because you have from the beginning considered the pictures as
a business, not as an entertainment. Perhaps in your desperate straits
you will for the first time try to think about the movie, to see it
steadily and see it whole.
My suggestion to you is that you engage a number of men and women: an
archæologist to unearth the history of the moving picture; a mechanical
genius to explain the camera and the projector to you; a typical movie
fan, if you can find one; and above all a man of no practical capacity
whatever: a theorist. Let these people get to work for you; do what
they tell you to do. You will hardly lose more money than in any other
case.
If the historian tells you that the pictures you produced in 1910 were
better than those you now lose money on, he is worthless to you. But
if he fails to tell you that the pictures of 1910 pointed the way to
the real right thing and that you have since departed from that way,
discharge him as a fool. For that is exactly what has occurred. In
your beginnings you were on the right track; I believe that in those
days you still looked at the screen. Ten years later you were too busy
looking at, or after, your bank account. Remember that ten years ago
there wasn’t a great name in the movies. And then, thinking of your
present plight, recall that you deliberately introduced great names and
chose Sir Gilbert Parker, Rupert Hughes, and Mrs Elinor Glyn. If I may
quote an author you haven’t filmed, it shall not be forgiven you.
Your historian ought to tell you that the moving picture came into
being as the result of a series of mechanical developments; your
technician will add the details about the camera and projector. From
both you will learn that you are dealing with _movement governed by
light_. It will be news to you. You seem not to realize the simplest
thing about your business. Further, you will learn that everything
you need to do _must_ be by these two agencies: movement and light.
(Counting in movement everything of pace and in light everything which
light can make visible to the eye, even if it be an emotion: do you
recall the unnatural splash of white in a street scene in _Caligari_?)
It will occur to you that the cut-back, the alternating exposition of
two concurrent actions, the vision, the dream, are all good; and that
the close-up, dearest of all your finds, usually dissociates a face
or an object from its moving background and is the most dangerous of
expedients. You will learn much from the camera and from what was done
with it in the early days.
I warn you again they were not great pictures except for _The Avenging
Conscience_ and--one you didn’t make--_Cabiria_. To each of these a
poet contributed. (Peace, Mr Griffith; the poet in your case was E. A.
Poe; and the warrior poet of Fiume contributed the scenario for the
second.) Mr Griffith contrived in his picture to project both beauty
and terror by combining _Annabel Lee_ with _The Telltale Heart_. A
sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and of
lost love through an _action_ of mystery and terror. (I think he made
a happy ending somehow--by having the central portion of his story
appear as a dream. How little it mattered since the _real_ emotion came
through the story.) The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere;
it was _felt_. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays
of light. And if I may anticipate the end, let me compare it with a
picture of 1922, a picturization as you call it, of Annabel Lee. It
was all scenery and captions; it presented a detestable little boy and
a pretty little girl doing æsthetic dancing along cliffs by the sea;
one almost saw the Ocean View Hotel in the background. Mercilessly the
stanzas appeared on the screen; but nothing was allowed to _happen_
except a vulgar representation of calf love. I cannot bear to describe
the disagreeable picture of grief at the end; I do not dare to think
what you may now be preparing with a really great poem. The lesson is
not merely one of taste; it is a question of knowing the camera, of
realizing that you _must_ project emotion by movement and by picture
combined.
I am trying to trace for you the development of the serious moving
picture as a _bogus_ art, and I can’t do better than assure you that
it was best before it was an “art” at all. (Or I can indicate that
slap-stick comedy, which you despise, is not bogus, is a real, and
valuable, and delightful entertainment.) I believe that you went out
West because the perpetual sun of southern California made taking easy;
there you discovered the lost romance of America, its Wild West and its
pioneer days, its gold rush and its Indians. You had it in your hands,
then, to make that past of ours alive; a small written literature and
a remnant of oral tradition remained for you to work on. On the whole
you did make a good beginning. You missed fine things, but you caught
the simple ones; you presented the material directly, with appropriate
sentiment. You relied on melodrama, which was the rightest thing you
ever did. Combat and pursuit, the last-minute rescue, were the three
items of your best pictures; and your cutting department, carefully
alternating the fight between white men and red with the slow-starting,
distant, approaching, arriving, victorious troops from the garrison
appealed properly to our soundest instincts. You went into the bad-man
period; you began to make an individual soldier, Indian, bandit,
pioneer, renegade, the focus of your interest: still good because you
related him to an active, living background. Dear Heaven! before you
had filmed Bret Harte you had created legendary heroes of your own.
Meanwhile Mr Griffith, apparently insatiable, was developing small
_genre_ scenes of slum life while he thought of filming the tragic
history of the South after the war. Other directors sought other
fields--notably that of the serial adventure film. Since they made
money for all concerned, you will not be surprised to hear these
serials praised: _The Exploits of Elaine_, the whole Pearl White
adventure, the thirty minutes of action closing on an impossible and
unresolved climax were, of course, infinitely better pictures than your
version of Mr Joseph Conrad’s _Victory_, your _Humoreske_, your _Should
a Wife Forgive_?[28] They were extremely silly; they worked too
closely on a scheme: getting out of last week’s predicament and into
next week’s can hardly be called a “form.” But within their limitations
they used the camera for all it was worth. It didn’t matter a bit that
the perils were preposterous, that the flights and pursuits were all
fakes composed by the speed of the projector. You were back in the days
of Nick Carter and the Liberty Boys; you hadn’t heard of psychology,
and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. You bored us when
your effects didn’t come off and I’m afraid amused us a little even
when they did. But you were on the right road.
There was very little _acting_ in these films and in the Wild West
exhibitions. There was a great deal of _action_. I can’t recall Pearl
White _registering_ a single time; I recall only movement, which was
excellent. It was later that your acting developed; up to this time
you were working with people who hadn’t succeeded in or were wholly
ignorant of the technique of the stage; they moved before the camera
gropingly at first, but gradually developing a technique suited to
the camera and to nothing else. I am referring to days so far back
that the old Biograph films used to be branded with the mark AB in a
circle, and this mark occurred in the photographed sets to prevent
stealing. In those days your actors and actresses were exceptionally
naïve and creative. You were on the point of discovering mass and line
in the handling of crowds, in the defile of a troop, in the movement
of individuals. Mr Griffith had already discovered that four men
running in opposite directions along the design of a figure 8 gave
the effect of sixteen men--a discovery lightly comparable to that of
Velasquez in the crossed spears of the Surrender of Breda. You would
have done well to continue your experiments with nameless individuals
and chaotic masses; but you couldn’t. You developed what you called
personalities--and after that, actresses.
Before _The Birth of a Nation_ was begun Mary Pickford had already
left Griffith. I have heard that he vowed to make Mae Marsh a greater
actress--as if she weren’t one from the start, as if acting mattered,
as if Mary Pickford ever could or needed to act. Remember that in _The
Avenging Conscience_ at least four people: Spottiswood Aiken, Henry
Walthall, Blanche Sweet, and another I cannot identify--the second
villain--_played_ superbly without acting. Conceive your own stupidity
in not knowing what Vachel Lindsay discovered: that “our Mary” was
literally “the Queen of my People,” a radiant, lovely, childlike
girl, a beautiful figurehead, a symbol of all our sentimentality. Why
did you allow her to become an actress? Why is everything associated
with her later work so alien to beauty? You did not see her legend
forming; you began to advertise her salary; you have, I believe
unconsciously, tried to restore her now by giving her the palest rôle
in all literature, that of Marguerite in _Faust_. You are ten years too
late. In the same ten years Blanche Sweet has almost disappeared and
Mae Marsh has not arrived; Gishes and Talmadges and Swansons and other
fatalities have triumphed. You have taken over the stage and the opera;
you have filmed Caruso and Al Jolson, too, for all I know. You now have
acting and no playing.
This is a matter of capital importance and I am willing to come closer
to a definition. Acting is the way of impersonating, of rendering
character, of presenting action which is suitable to the stage; it has,
in the first place, a specific relation to the size of the stage and to
that of the auditorium; it has also a second important relation to the
lines spoken. Good actors--they are few--will always suit the gesture
to the utterance in the sense that their gesture will be on the beat
of the words; failure to know this ruined several of John Barrymore’s
soliloquies in _Hamlet_. Neither of these two primary and determinant
circumstances affect the moving picture. It should be obvious that
if good acting is adapted to the stage, nothing less than a miracle
could make it also suitable to the cinema. The same thing is true of
opera, which is in a desperate state because it failed to develop a
type of representation adapted to musical instead of spoken expression.
Opera and the pictures both needed “playing”--by which I cover _other
forms_ of representation, of impersonation, characterization, without
identifying them. It is unlikely that opera and pictures require the
same kind of playing; but neither of them can bear acting. Chaplin, by
the way, is a player, not an actor--although we all think of him as
an actor because the distinction is tardily made. I should say that
Mae Marsh, too, was a player in _The Birth_. So was H. B. Warner in a
war play called _Shell 49_ (I am not sure of the figure); and there
have been others. I have never seen Conrad Veidt or Werner Kraus on
the stage; in _Caligari_ they were players, not actors. Possibly since
Kraus is considered the greatest of German actors, he acted so well
that he seemed to be playing. But that requires genius and the Gishes
have no genius.
The emergence of Mary Pickford and the production of _The Birth of
a Nation_ make the years 1911–14 the critical time of the movies.
Nearly all your absurdities began about this time, including your
protest against the word movies as no longer suited to the dignity
of your art. From the success of _The Birth_ sprang the spectacle
film which was intrinsically all right and only corrupted Griffith
and the pictures because it was unintelligently handled thereafter.
From the success of Mary Pickford came the whole tradition of the
movie as a genteel intellectual entertainment. The better side is
the spectacle and the fact that in 1922 the whole mastery of the
spectacular film has passed out of your hands ought to be sufficient
proof that you bungled somewhere. Or, to drive it home, what can you
make of the circumstance that one of the very greatest successes, in
America and abroad, was _Nanook of the North_, a spectacle film to
which the producer and the artistic director contributed nothing--for
it was a picture of actualities, made, according to rumour, in the
interests of a fur-trading company? You will reply that my assertions
are pure theory. It is true that I have never filmed a scenario in my
life. But as a spectator I am the one who is hard headed and you the
theorists. What I and several million others know is that something
wrong crept into the spectacle film. We know absolutely that the
overblown idea of _Intolerance_ was foisted on the simple tale of _The
Mother and the Law_, and that while single episodes of this stupendous
picture were excellent, the whole failed of effect. In _The Birth_
Mr Griffith had two stories with no perceptible internal relation,
but with sufficient personal interest to carry; even here not one
person in ten thousand saw the significance of the highfalutin title.
But after the time of _Intolerance_ Mr Griffith receded swiftly, and
his latest pictures are merely lavish. It is of no significance that
Mr Griffith treats Thomas Burke as though the latter were a great
writer instead of a good scenario writer; the prettifying of _Broken
Blossoms_ was so consistent, and the fake acting such good fake, that
the picture almost succeeded. Everywhere Mr Griffith now gives us
excesses--everything is big: the crowds, the effects, the rainstorms,
the ice floes, and everything is informed with an overwhelming dignity.
He has long ago ceased to create beauty--only beautiful effects, like
set pieces in fireworks. And he was the man destined by his curiosity,
his honesty, his intelligence, to reach the heights of the moving
picture.
It is a hard thing to say, but it is literally true that something
in Mr Griffith has been corrupted and died--his imagination. _Broken
Blossoms_ was a last expiring flicker. Since then he has constructed
well; I understand that his success has been great; I am not denying
that Mr Griffith is the man to do _Ben-Hur_. But he has imagined
nothing on a grand scale, nor has he created anything delicate or fine.
People talk of _The Birth_ as if the battle scenes were important;
they were very good and a credit to Griffith, who directed, and to
George Bitzer, who photographed them; the direction of the ride of the
Klansmen was better, it had some imagination. And far better still was
a moment earlier in the piece, when Walthall returned to the shattered
Confederate home and Mae Marsh met him at the door, wearing raw cotton
smudged to resemble ermine--brother and sister both pretending that
they had forgotten their dead, that they didn’t care what happened.
And then--for the honours of the scene went to Griffith, not even to
the exquisite Mae Marsh--then there appeared from within the doorway
the arm of their mother and with a gesture of unutterable loveliness
it enlaced the boy’s shoulders and drew him tenderly into the house.
To have omitted the tears, to have shown nothing but the arm in that
single curve of beauty, required, in those days, high imagination. It
was the emotional climax of the film; one felt from that moment that
the rape and death of the little girl was already understood in the
vast suffering sympathy of the mother. So much Mr Griffith never again
accomplished; it was the one moment when he stood beside Chaplin as a
creative artist--and it was ten years ago.
Of course if Griffith hasn’t come through there is hardly anything
to hope for from the others. Mr Ince always beat him in advertized
expenditure; Fox was always cheaper and easier and had Annette
Kellerman and did _The Village Blacksmith_. The logical outcome of
Griffithism is in the pictures he didn’t make: in _When Knighthood
Was in Flower_ and in _Robin Hood_, neither of which I could sit
through. The lavishness of these films is appalling; the camera runs
mad in everything but action, which dies a hundred deaths in as many
minutes. Of what use are sets by Urban if the action which occurs in
them is invisible to the naked eye? The old trick of using a crowd
as a background and holding the interest in the individual has been
lost; the trick of using the crowd as an individual hasn’t been found
because we must have our love story. The spectacle film is slowly
settling down to the level of the stereopticon slide.
Comparison with German films is inevitable. They are as much on the
wrong track as we are; and the exception, _Caligari_, is defective
because in a proper attempt to relieve the camera from the burden of
recording actuality, the producers gave it the job of recording modern
paintings for background. The acting was, however, playing; and the
destruction of realism, even if it was accomplished by a questionable
expedient, will have much to do with the future of the film. Yet even
in the spectacle film the Germans managed to do something. _Passion_
and _Deception_ and the Pharaoh film and the film made out of _Sumurun_
were not lavish. And in the manipulation of material (not of the
instrument, where we know much more than they) there came occasionally
flashes of the real thing. In _Deception_ there was a scene where the
courtyard had to be cleared of an angry mob. Every American producer
has handled the parallel scene and every one in the same way, centring
in the mêlée between civilians and police. What Lubitsch did was
to form a single line of pike staffs and to show a solid mass of
crowd--the feeling of hostility was projected in the opposition of
line and mass. And slowly the _space behind_ the pike staffs opened.
The bright calm sunlight fell on a wider and widening strip of the
courtyard. One was hardly aware of struggle; all one saw was that
gradually broadening patch of open, uncontested _space in the light_.
And suddenly one knew that the courtyard was cleared, one seemed to
hear the faint murmur of the crowd outside, and then silence. I am
lost in admiration of this simplicity which involves _every correct
principle of the æsthetics of the moving picture_. The whole thing was
done with movement and light--the movement massed and the light on the
open space. That is the true, the imaginative camera technique, which
we failed to develop.[29]
The object of that technique is _the indirect communication of
emotion_--indirect because that is the surest way, in all the arts,
of multiplying the degree of intensity. The American spectacle film
still communicates a thrill in the direct way of a highwayman with a
blackjack. But the American serious film drama communicates not even
this: it is at this moment entirely dead, or in other words, wholly
bogus. I may be wrong in thinking that our present position develops
out of the creation of Mary Pickford as a star. The result is the same.
For as soon as the movie became “the silent drama” it took upon itself
responsibilities. It had to be dignified and artistic; it had to have
literature and actors and ideals. The simple movie plots no longer
sufficed, and stage and novel were called upon to contribute their
small share to the success of an art which seriously believed itself
to be the consummation of all the arts. The obligation remained to
choose only those examples which were suitable to the screen. It was,
however, not adaptability which guided the choice, but the great name.
Eventually everything was filmed because what couldn’t be adapted could
be spoiled. The degree of vandalism passes words; and what completed
the ruin was that good novels were spoiled not to make good films,
but to make bad ones. _Victory_ was a vile film in addition to being
a vulgar betrayal of Conrad; even the good Molnar with his exciting
second-rate play, _The Devil_, found himself so foully, so disgustingly
changed on the screen that the whole idea, not a great one, was lost
and nothing remained but a sentimental vulgarity which had no meaning
of its own, quite apart from any meaning of his. In each of these the
elements are the same: a psychological development through an action.
By corrupting the action the producers changed the idea; bad enough in
itself, they failed to understand what they were doing and supplied
nothing to take the place of what they had destroyed. The actual movies
so produced refused to project any consecutive significant action
whatsoever.
It would be futile to multiply examples--as futile as to note that
there have been well-filmed novels and plays. The essential thing
is that nearly every picture made recently has borrowed something,
usually in the interest of dignity, gentility, refinement--and the
picture side, the part depending upon action before the camera, has
gone steadily down. Long subtitles explain everything except the lack
of action. Carefully built scenes are settings in which nothing takes
place. The climax arrives in the masterpieces of the de Mille school.
They are “art.” They are genteel. They offend nothing--except the
intelligence. High life in the de Mille manner is not recognizable as
decent human society, but it is refined, and the picture with it is
refined out of existence. Ten years earlier there was another type of
drama: the vamp, in short, and Theda Bara was its divinity. I have
little to say in its defense because it was unalterably stupid (I don’t
say I didn’t like it). But it wasn’t half so pretentious as the de
Mille social drama, and not half so vulgar. What it had to say, false
or banal or ridiculous, it said entirely with the camera. It appealed
to low passions and it truckled to imitative morality; there was in it
a sort of corruption. Yet one could resist that frank ugliness as one
can’t resist the polite falsehood of the new culture of the movies.
It would be easy to exaggerate your failures. Your greatest mistake was
a natural one--in taking over the realistic theatre. You knew that a
photograph can reproduce actuality without significantly transposing
it, and you assumed that that was the duty of the film. But you forgot
that the rhythm of the film was creating something, and that this
creation adapted itself entirely to the projection of emotion by means
_not realistic_; that in the end the camera was as legitimately an
instrument of distortion as of reproduction. You gave us, in short,
the pleasure of _verification_ in every detail; the Germans who are
largely in the same tradition--they should have known better because
their theatre knew better--improved the method at times and counted
on significant detail. But neither of you gave us the pleasure of
_recognition_. Neither you nor they have taken the first step (except
in _Caligari_) toward giving us the highest degree of pleasure, that of
escaping actuality and entering into a created world, built on its own
inherent logic, keeping time in its own rhythm--where we feel ourselves
at once strangers and at home. That has been done elsewhere--not in the
serious film.
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.
[Illustration:
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.
Blaise Cendrars, poet, responsible for the _Anthologie Nègre_, is the
author of _La Fin du Monde_ and of _La Perle Fièvreuse_; the second of
these is running as a serial in a Belgian magazine, _Signaux_. Both
are called Novels; the third instalment of _The Pearl_ adding the word
cinematographic. _The End of the World_ is a cosmic cinema-novel in
fifty-five swift, concisely told scenes.
It deals with a sort of deity, resident on a planet accessible to all
the mechanical comforts of this earth, who is induced to travel to Mars
as a propagandist for his own religion. Like many propagandists he errs
in his psychology and, in a Billy Sunday frenzy of the imagination,
shows the Martians all the cruelties his religion is capable of. Too
late he learns that “the Martians are disillusioned and confirmed
pacifists, iodophages living on the peptonic vapours of human blood,
but incapable of bearing the sight of the least cruelty.” The mission
failing, he decides to make good on certain prophecies uttered in his
name. The following scenes are left a little in the air; continuity
is lacking. One begins again with the sculptured angel on Notre Dame
blowing a blast on her trumpet and the whole world rushing towards
Paris and crumbling into dust. Thereafter, with the aid of retarded and
accelerated projection, we see the world slowly dissolving into its
elements, through those stages so graphically presented to us by H. G.
Wells. There is chaos, and then annihilation.
And then, by an accident in the projection room, the film begins to
reverse and so, naturally, one gropes upward out of the slime and
returns to the first scene--to which is added the single phrase “It’s
bankruptcy.” It opens with the deity “at his American (roll-top) desk.
He hastily signs innumerable letters. He is in his shirt sleeves with
a green eye-shade on his forehead. He rises, lights a big cigar, looks
at his watch, strides nervously up and down the room.... He makes notes
on his pad and blows away the ash which falls from his cigar between
the leaves. Suddenly he snatches the telephone and begins to ’phone
furiously....”
That is American movie technique which M Cendrars has evidently learned
all too well, because he uses it, in all its tedious detail, in _La
Perle Fièvreuse_, for which he is publishing not a scenario but a
director’s script, with the cutbacks and visions and close-ups all
numbered and marked. It is in the manner of the old Biograph movies
with what may turn out to be not such innocent fun at the expense of
the detective film. Among its characters are Max Trick, director of
Trick’s Criminal Courier, the great daily which specializes in criminal
news. He is marked “Type: le President Taft” and is first shown in
his office with twenty-five telephones in front of him; among his
collaborators are Nick Carter and Arsène Lupin, Conan Doyle and Maurice
Leblanc.
What Jules Romains has accomplished is much more remarkable, for he has
pushed the method of the cinema forward a long and significant step,
and, while using everything it can give, he has produced a first class
work of fiction. The plot of _Donogoo-Tonka_ you will see at once, is
entirely suitable to filming; it is not perhaps suitable to commercial
success, but that can be, if it isn’t, another matter.
It begins in Paris with the unfortunate Lamendin, who is about to
commit suicide. A friend gives him a card with the legend: “Before
committing suicide ... don’t fail to read the other side,” and on the
reverse is the advertisement of Professor Miguel Rufisque, director
of the Institute of Biometric Psychotherapy, who guarantees to give
you, within seven days, a violent love of life. Lamendin goes to the
consulting room and after a fantastic examination is given certain
instructions which eventually land him in the library of Prof. Yves
Trouhadec, a geographer. Trouhadec would be certain of election to the
Geographic Institute if he hadn’t, many years before, placed on a map
of South America the wholly imaginary town of Donogoo-Tonka, in the
gold-mining area. Lamendin now proposes to float a company, start an
expedition, and insure the Professor’s election by actually creating
the place.
In the second reel Donogoo-Tonka is launched; in the third we have
adventurers in all parts of the world preparing to rush the gold
fields, while Lamendin tarries at home making fake moving pictures of
the place. At the end of the reel the adventurers have penetrated into
the heart of the South American desert and, too wearied to go forward,
aware of the deception practised upon them, encamp where they are.
Derisively they call the place Donogoo-Tonka.
Later, a second group of adventurers comes. They are disappointed in
the look of the place. But they are interested to hear that gold is
being found; and while Lamendin at last sets sail, the Donogoo-Tonka
Central Bar and the London & Donogoo-Tonka’s Splendid Hotel are going
up; it is obviously the intention of the earlier arrivals to mulct the
later.
And then, of course, gold really is found in the river bed and the
price of all provisions goes up fifty per cent.
Regrettably, _en voyage_, Lamendin tells his pioneers that Donogoo
does not exist. On his arrival at Rio de Janeiro he receives a cable
from the Professor, demanding immediate results; and as he turns in
despair he reads the announcement by Agence Meyer-Kohn, of the next
caravan to the gold fields of Donogoo-Tonka. He arrives; he takes
possession; he founds an empire, in which the religion of Scientific
Error is established. Trouhadec, still living, is deified; he becomes
Trouhadec, Father of his Country. The utility of geography is one of
the prescribed subjects for public lectures.
That is a slightly more intelligent plot than most of the adventure
things one sees in the movies. It is in the detail and in the
presentation of an _idea_, the idea of scientific error, that M Romains
has pressed beyond the professional technique of the moving picture
without once exceeding its natural limitations. For instance in the
waiting room where Lamendin sits with the other would-be suicides:
“Absurdity, given off by so many brains, becomes palpable. One begins
to distinguish a sort of very subtle exhalation which disengages itself
from the human bodies and little by little charges the atmosphere.”
The settings in this scene are very much in the manner of _Caligari_.
Or there is the debate in the soul of Professor Trouhadec who knows
that he will profit by a fraud. From the beginning the spectator must
realize that the debate is only on the surface; that in his heart
Trouhadec is going to accept; the spectator is to see him thinking of
truth with a capital T and, much deeper down, of himself as a member
of the Institute. Just as in the exploitation of Donogoo-Tonka we
see a man coming up the steps of a subway station with the words
Donogoo-Tonka written on every step; until, as he emerges, his skull
ceases to be opaque, and we see the twelve little letters dancing in
his brain. M Romains has even carried the thing over into Keystone
farce, so sure is he of his medium. During one of the lectures “his
eloquence is so persuasive, his thought opens such penetrating channels
into human nature that, little by little, little by little, a soft down
begins to sprout on the bald head” of a man in the audience. _Ça c’est
du Cinema_, as M Cendrars says.
M Romains has also a complete understanding of projection. He protests,
in a preface, against the monotonous speeding-up of pictures and
urges that this one be taken and shown in the rhythm of ordinary
life, with a shading toward slow, especially in the scenes “where the
only events which pass before us are the thoughts of the characters”
(required reading for Mr Griffith and Mr de Mille for one year is in
those words). In the scenes which exploit the shares in Donogoo-Tonka
we enter into the minds of individuals, of groups, of crowds; at the
end the very framework of a building succumbs to the madness of the
idea. And then, with a technical mastery not yet put into practise,
M Romains directs that the various scenes just projected be shown
again, side by side, with a gradually accelerated rhythm. In the scenes
of the adventurers we get glimpses at Marseilles, London, Naples,
Porto, Singapore, San Francisco; then we see the groups starting out;
the lines of their voyage converge. These scenes are projected first
in succession and then _simultaneously_. Each time we see them we
recognize some of the individuals we have seen before. “And when by
chance the faces are turned towards us, we have a feeling that they,
too, recognize us.” The cinema has not yet accomplished that; chiefly,
I fancy, because it never has been asked to.
M Romains is the prophet of _unanisme_, and it would be remarkable
if he did not use the moving picture to push his point. The end of
Donogoo-Tonka is pure poetry.
The horizon has receded before the Palace and the chief figures look
out into a light which has its own laws. Paris appears deep in the
background. “But so close, perhaps, that we are troubled to see it and
would like to fall back a step.
“As if, yielding to friendly pressure, the world has renounced for one
evening its concept of space and all its habits.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe so much to others in connexion with this book that if I were to
set down the names and the reasons it would appear, quite properly,
that I have done little except collect and theorize about material
presented to me; it might also appear that I wish to make others
responsible. Virtually everyone I know has contributed something--and
in many cases they did so before I had thought of writing this book.
I can therefore make only specific acknowledgments. Above all to two
managing editors, John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, Jr., of _Vanity
Fair_ and to their editor, Frank Crowninshield; they published several
essays which later served as the raw material for chapters here,
published portions of other chapters written expressly for this book,
and otherwise encouraged and prospered me--to such an extent that I owe
to them and to my fellow-editors of the _Dial_ the holiday which made
it possible for me to write at all. Except as otherwise acknowledged,
the illustrations are reproduced with the permission of the artists;
in addition, I have to thank the editors of the two journals mentioned
for joining their permission in the case of work they originally
reproduced, the firm of Albert and Charles Boni for the liberal use
of Frueh’s Stage Folk, and H. T. Parker of the Boston _Transcript_
for letting me reprint _A Conversation in Old Athens_. For technical
information and exceptionally painstaking criticism I am indebted
to Sara and Gerald Murphy, Martin Brown, Alexander Steinert, Deems
Taylor, Lewis Galantière, H. K. Moderwell, and Dorothy Butler; for the
material in the appendix to Charles Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Bushnell
Dimond, Walter Hoban, and Sophie Wittenberg. My indebtedness to those
whom I do not know--those I have written about--is too apparent to need
emphasis, and too great to be adequately acknowledged.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Except that supplied by the professional journals--often excellent.
[2] But there is more to say; a little of it occurs on page 41.
[3] Scenario by the adroit Anita Loos.
[4] Seven years ago, when this imaginary conversation was published, I
wanted to be fair to Mr Eaton and to persuade Mr Griffith to do Helen
of Troy. I succeeded in neither, and the document has only historical
interest. I do not know Mr Eaton’s present stand on the movies, and
I apologize to him for retaining his name here. What I do know is Mr
Griffith’s position. It will be entertaining to compare it with the
imaginary future outlined for him above. See page 323.
G. S.
[5] See Appendix.
[6] It appeared in _The New Republic_ and will probably be found in
_The Flower in Drama_ (Scribners).
[7] See page 92.
[8] My indebtedness, and, I suppose, the indebtedness of everyone who
cares at all for negro music, is apparent--to Afro-American Folksongs,
by Henry Edward Krehbiel (Schirmer).
[9] It has been clairvoyantly pointed out to me by another composer
that Berlin’s preëminence in ragtime and jazz may be traced to his
solitary devotion to melody and rhythm; in the jazz sense there remains
something always pure in his work. This supports the suggestion made in
the next paragraph.
[10] Internal, off-beat rhyme occurred as long ago as _Waiting for
the Robert E. Lee_. Bud de Sylva has used it intelligently, but
not expertly enough in _Where is the Man of My Dreams?_ and Brian
Hooker and William Le Baron make it a great factor in their highly
sophisticated lyrics. So also Cole Porter.
[11] In “The Spice of Variety,” which he conducts for _Saucy Stories_.
[12] Since writing this I am informed that the Winter Garden has
changed, at least structurally. But even if the type of show at
that house also changes, _The Passing Show_ as a type will be seen
elsewhere, so I leave what I have written. In 1913 or 1914 Mr H. K.
Moderwell wrote of the worst show in years, “They call it _The Passing
Show_. Let it pass.” Apparently they did.
[13] This review appeared in _Vanity Fair_ sometime in the summer of
1922. I allow it to stand with nothing more than verbal corrections
in spite of my dislike of books which collect articles expressly
written for magazine publication, because I feel that the negro show
is extraordinarily transient and that a transient criticism of it is
adequate. The permanent qualities are touched on elsewhere; especially
in the essay entitled “Toujours Jazz.” Since this was written there
have been other negro shows, and I have heard that one was better than
_Shuffle Along_. What has interested me more is the report that there
is a “nigger show by white men” which is standing them up every night.
This verifies a prediction made below--that the negro show would have
an effect on the white man’s. I am not at all sure that there will
not continue to be negro shows for a long time--why in Heaven’s name
shouldn’t there be? They have their qualities and their great virtues.
It is only in relation to the sophisticated Broadway piece that I find
them lacking; and have perhaps not been fair enough to them.
[14] For da Ponte’s share in the work, cf. Edgar Istel: Das Libretto,
which analyzes the changes made in Beaumarchais’ play.
[15] All this was written before Bert Savoy died. I haven’t changed the
verbs to the past tense. “How well could we have spared for him....”
[16] R. C. Benchley has written a just and sympathetic account of
Jackson. It appeared in a magazine and is not, so far as I know,
available in book form.
[17] A number of comic-strip artists, on achieving fame, stop drawing,
leaving that work to copyists of exceptional skill. I do not know
whether this is the case in the _Happy Hooligan_ strip.
[18] I must hasten to correct an erroneous impression which may have
caused pain to many of Krazy’s admirers. The three children, Milton,
Marshall, and Irving, are of Ignatz, not, as Mr Stark Young says, of
Krazy. Krazy is not an unmarried mother. For the sake of the record I
may as well note here the names of the other principals: Offisa Bull
Pupp; Mrs Ignatz Mice; Kristofer Kamel; Joe Bark the moon hater; Don
Kiyoti, that inconsequential heterodox; Joe Stork, alias Jose Cigueno;
Mock Duck; Kolin Kelly the brick merchant; Walter Cephus Austridge; and
the Kat Klan: Aunt Tabby, Uncle Tom, Krazy Katbird, Osker Wildcat, Alec
Kat, and the Krazy Katfish.
[19] See Appendix.
[20] Heywood Broun has discovered that everybody in vaudeville is an
“artist” except the trained seal.
[21] I do not know enough of Carl Hyson and Dorothy Dickson or of the
Astaires to judge their place.
[22] For example: “Ours is a sincere doubt as to whether the question
‘And what did _you_ do during the Great War?’ might not embarrass,
among others, God.”
[23] He said of Firpo that when he came up after the sixth or seventh
knock-down, his face looked like a slateful of wrong answers.
[24] A footnote to a footnote is preposterous. Perhaps the very excess
of its obscurity will give it prominence and render faint justice to
the old New York _Hippodrome_. It is a fine example of handling of
material, and of adjustment, spoiled occasionally by too much very loud
singing and a bit of art. It is part of New York’s small-townness; but
it is so vast in its proportions that it can never acquire the personal
following of a small one-ring circus like the Medrano in Paris. I adore
the _Hippodrome_ when it is a succession of acts: the trained crow
and Ferry who plays music on a fence and the amazing mechanical and
electrical effects. Joe Jackson, one of the greatest of clowns, played
there, too, and had ample scope. I like also the complete annihilation
of personality in the chorus. When you see three hundred girls doing
the same thing it becomes a problem in mass--I recall one instance when
it was a mass of white backs with black lines indicating the probable
existence of clothes--the whole thing was quite unhuman. And one great
scene in which, I believe, the whole of the personnel participated:
there were, it seemed, hundreds of tumblers and scores of clowns, and
a whole toy shop in excited action. Oddly enough, one finds that the
weakness of the _Hip_ is in its humour; there is plenty of it, but it
is not concentrated, and there is no specific _Hippodrome_ “style.”
What it will become under the new Keith régime remains to be seen.
[25] I have seen them since in another entrance, the most brilliant of
all. See Appendix.
[26] They nevertheless played exquisitely, I am told, in the
Cocteau-Milhaud _Bœuf sur le Toit_.
[27] _Quanto più, un’ arte porta seco fatica di corpo, tanto più è
vile!_ Pater, who quotes this of Leonardo, calls it “princely.”
[28] It is not too late for you to film Mr D. Taylor’s _Should a
Brother-in-Law Give a Damn?_
[29] I haven’t seen _The Covered Wagon_. Its theme returns to the
legendary history of America. There is no reason why it should not have
been highly imaginative. But I wonder whether the thousands of prairie
schooners one hears about are the film or the image. In the latter case
there is no objection.
[30] They have done so. See “The Cinema Novel.”
[31] I wrote once, and was properly rapped over the knuckles for
writing, that it wasn’t to escape Bach, but to escape Puccini, that
one played Berlin. Mr Haviland, whom I have quoted frequently, replied
that those who really cared for jazz cared for it, not as an escape
from any other art. I had not intended to write an apology; only,
since I was replying to the usual attack on the jazz arts, I wanted to
indicate that in addition to their primary virtues they have this great
secondary one, that when we are too fed up with bad drawing, bad music,
bad acting, and second-rate sentiment, we can be sure of consolation in
the lively arts.
_Index of Principal Names_
INDEX OF PRINCIPAL NAMES
(_Numerals enclosed in =equals signs= indicate the chief references_)
Adams, F. P., 120, =279–282=
Ade, George, 119, 120, 166
Aiken, Spottiswood, 329
Alder, Else, 170
Anderson, John Murray, 131, 134, =143–145=, 153, 371
Anderson, Sherwood, 123, 341
Arbuckle, Fatty, 12, 18, 19
Astaires, The, 272 f
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 310, 350
Baer, Arthur “Bugs,” 278, =285–287=
Baker, Belle, 196, 256
Balieff, Nikita, =260–262=
Bara, Theda, 338
Barnes, Helen, 186
Barton, Jimmy, 172, 206, 207
Barrymore, John, 330
Bayes, Nora, 172
Beggar’s Opera, 169, 173, 188
Bell, Clive, 104, 108, 150
Benchley, R. C., 208, 316
Berlin, Irving, =57–66=, =69–80=, =83–108=, 131, 139, 141–143, 145,
170, =186–188=, 216, 242, 273, 318, 348, 353, =369–371=
Bernard, Sam, 142
Bernie, Barney, 100
Bierce, Ambrose, 120
Bitzer, George, 333
Blake, Sissle and, 94, 96, =149–158=
Bolton, Guy, 165, 166
Braham, Philip, 74
Brian, Donald, 172, 272
Briants, The Two, 251, 257
Brice, Fanny, 135, 145, =191–200=, =208=, 251, 252, 309
Briggs, Clare, 216, =218–220=
Brisbane, Arthur, 234
Brooks, Shelton, 156
Brooks, Van Wyck, 111
Broun, Heywood, 113, 129, 136, 250 f, 281, 283, =284–285=
Brown Brothers, The Six, 251, 256
Brown, Jessica, 272
Busch, Wilhelm, 215
Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The, 8, 325, 331, 335, 339
Cæsar, Irving, 371
Cantor, Eddie, 129, 139, =178–180=, 184, 196, 304
Carpenter, John Alden, 144, 217, 236, =240–242=, 377–379
Carter, Frank, 146
Carter, Nick, 328
Caryll, Ivan, 65, 165, 170
Castle, Irene, 186, 309, 318
Castle, Vernon and Irene, 156, =273–274=
Cendrars, Blaise, =384–386=
Chaliapin, Feodor, 204, 313
Chalif, Louis H., 318
Chaplin, Charlie, =3–24=, =41–54=, 144, 213, 232, 238, 241, 259, 301,
309, 319, 334, 347, 348, 352, 353, =361–366=
Cimarosa, Domenico, 164
Claire, Ina, 146, 185
Clark, Bobby, 134, 207
Cocteau, Jean, 304
Cohan, George M., 70, 78, =137–139=, 154, 171, 260, 271
Collier, Willie, 138, 142
Confrey, Zez, 84, 90, 92
Conklin, Chester, 12, 17
Conrad, Joseph, 327, 337
Cook, Clyde, 18
Cook, Joe, 178, 251, =258–260=
Coogan, Jackie, 50
Crawford, Clifton, 172
Creamer and Layton, 94, 96, =149–158=
Crowley, Aleister, =374–376=
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 325
DeBeck, Billy, 224, 225
De Mille, Cecil, 6, 309, 338
Deslys, Gaby, 185, 186, 187, =209–210=
Dickson, Dorothy, 272 f
Dillingham, Charles B., 145–146, 169, 170
Dimond, Bushnell, 9
Dixon, Harland, 169, 186, 187, 273
Donahue, Jack, 256
Donaldson, Walter, 84, 91
Doner, Kitty, 179
Dooley, Johnny, 172, 241, 251, 255, 256, 271
Dooley, Mr (Martin), =111–126=, 309
Dooley, Ray, 178, 241
Doyle and Dixon, 186, 187, =273=
Drew, Sidney, Mr & Mrs, 19–20
Dryden, Helen, 145, 172, 186
Duffy and Sweeney, 251, 257
Duncan, Isadora, 317
Eaton, Walter Pritchard, =27–38=
Eliot, T. S., 104, 106, 361
Ellis, Havelock, 345
Emerson, John, 339
Errol, Leon, 146, =206=, 260, 271
Europe, Jim, 100, 103, =156–158=
Fairbanks, Douglas, 20
Fall, Leo, 64, 65
Fazenda, Louise, 12
Ferry, 294
Fisher, Bud, 216
Fisher, Fred, 84, 91
Fortunello and Cirillino, 144, 209, 294, 297
Forty-niners, =260–261=, 316
Fox, Fontaine, 225
Fox, Harry, 186, 187
Fox, William, 334
France, Anatole, 118, 231
Fratellini, The Three, 209, =297–305=, =380–382=
Friml, Rudolf, 165
Frisco, 271
Frueh, Alfred, 217, =227–228=
Geddes, Norman-Bel, 172, 313
George, Yvonne, 144, 145, 197, 198
Gershwin, George, 73, 74, 75, 89, 91, =92–93=, 195
Gibbs, A. Harrington, =94–95=
Gilbert and Sullivan, 161, 162, 163, 164
Glass, Montague, 119, 120, 121
Glyn, Elinor, 324
Goldberg, Rube, 224, 227
Gourmont, Remy de, 203
Granville, Bernard, 181
Greenwich Village Follies, =143–145=
Greenwood, Charlotte, 272
Grey, Gilda, 95, 135, 141, 154, 209
Griffith, D. W., 4, 6, 13, 23, =27–38=, 323, 325, 327, 329, =331–335=
Grock, 294, 297
Guilbert, Yvette, 197
Ham & Bud, 22, 352
Hammond, Percy, 249
Handy, 97
Harris, Charles K., 58
Haviland, Walter, 100–102, 255, 353
Hazzard, John, 144, 372
Held, Anna, 135
held, j., 226
Herbert, Victor, 135, =171–172=, 199
Herriman, George, 50, 144, 214, 217, 228, =231–245=, 309, 377, 379
Hershfield, 218, =224–225=
Hirsch, Louis, 66, 72, 89–90, 171
Hitchcock, Raymond, 178
Hoban, Walter, 144, 220, =225=
Hooker, Brian, 89, 172
Houdini, Harry, 256
Howard, Eugene and Willie, 208
Hughes, Rupert, 324
Hyson, Carl, 272 f
Ince, Thomas H., 4, 6, 13, 334
Irwin, Wallace, 119, 120
Jackson, Joe, =208–209=, 294 f
James, Henry, 310, 314
Janis, Elsie, =185–186=
Johnston, Justine, 186, 187
Jolson, Al, 62, 74, 91, 139, 177, 178, 179, 184, =191–200=, 309, 347
Joyce, James, 104, 106, 117
Kalman, Emmerich, 65
Katterjohn, Monte, 339
Keaton, Buster, 6, 17, 18
Keith, B. F., Vaudeville, =249–263=, =294=
Kelly, Harry, 145, 207
Kern, Jerome, 66, 72–73, 92, 161, =165–170=, 273, 348
Ketten, M., 221
Keystone Comedy, =3–24=
Knight, Percival, 172
Kraus, Werner, 331
Krehbiel, H. E., 86–88
Kreisler, Fritz, 170
Lardner, Ring, =111–126=, 135, 309
Layton, Creamer and, 94, 96, =149–158=
LeBaron, William, 170
Lehar, Franz, 65, 161, 163, 164
Leonard, Baird, 279, =282=
Leonardo da Vinci, 319
Levey, Ethel, =254–255=, 258
Lewis, Ada, 169, 209
Lloyd, Harold, 6, 15, 49
Loos, Anita, 20 f, 339
Lopez, Vincent, 100, =102–103=
Lorraine, Lillian, 135, 146
Lubitsch, E., 13, 335
MacNamara, Tom, 222
McIntyre and Heath, 152
McQuinn, Robert, 145, 186
Mann, Hank, 12, 15
Mansfield, Richard, 249
Marceline, 294
Marquis, Don, =282–283=
Marsh, Mae, 329, 330, 331, 333
Marx Brothers, The Four, 251, 256
Maurice, 169, =273=
Mencken, H. L., 278
Merrill, Blanche, 197
Milhaud, Darius, 85, 100, 304 f
Mills, Florence, 62, 99, =154–155=
Milton, Robert, 165
Mistinguett, 185
Moderwell, H. K., 131 f
Moeller, Helen, 318
Molnar, Ferencz, 314, 315, 337
Monckton, L., 65, 165
Monroe, George, 205
Moore, Florence, 142, 209
Moran, Polly, 12
Moret, Neil, 62
Morgan, Marion, 318
Morley, Christopher, =283=
Moss and Frye, 252
Mozart, W. A., 161, 163, 164
Muck, Karl, 157
Music Box Revue, =141–143=
Nathan, George Jean, 60, 129
Nijinsky, Waslaw, 318, 353
Normand, Mabel, 11, 19
Norris, Frank, =331=
Parker, Sir Gilbert, 324
Pater, Walter, Title page, 108, 203, 319
Pennington, Ann, 272
Phillips, H. I., =277–278=
Picasso, Pablo, 104, 107, 310, =345–347=
Pilcer, Harry, 187
Piquer, Conchita, 140
Porter, Cole, 73, =92–94=
Powers, T. E., 226
Preston, Keith, 284
Puccini, Giacomo, 312, 313, 345, 353
Purviance, Edna, 12
Randall, Carl, 270, 271
Rath Brothers, 140, 251, 257, 351–352
Ray, Charles, 16, 21
Ring, Blanche, 139, 208
Riq, 279
Rogers, Will, 129, 135
Romains, Jules, =386–390=
Rubens, Paul, 165
Ruth, George H. (Babe), 351
Sale, Chic, 257, 258
Sanderson, Julia, 172, 272
Santayana, George, 140, 249
Savoy, Bert, 134, 144, 145, =205–206=
Savoy Operetta, =161–173=
Schaeffer, Sylvester, 258
Semon, Larry, 18
Sennett, Mack, =4–24=, 42, 309
Shaw, Bernard, 314
Sissle and Blake, 94, 96, =149–158=
Sloane, A. Baldwin, 372
Smith, Edgar, 372
Smith, Syd, 221
St. John, Al, 17
Stone, Fred, =182–183=, 249
Stearns, Harold E., 214, 215
Straus, Oscar, 163, 164, 168
Strauss, Johann, 64
Strawinsky, Igor, 99, 104, 106, 346
Sullivan, C. Gardner, 14
Swain, Mack, 17
Sweet, Blanche, 329, 330
Swift, Jonathan, 111, 121, 123
Swinnerton, Jimmy, 215
Symons, Arthur, 250
Tad, 218, =220=, 227, 367
Tanguay, Eva, =374–376=
Taylor, Bert Leston, =278–279=
Taylor, Deems, 242, 328 f
Tempest, Marie, 154
Tempest and Sunshine, 186
Thomas, Augustus, 314
Tiller Girls, 270
Tinney, Frank, =180–182=, 196
Turpin, Ben, 11–12, 16–17, 44–45
Twain, Mark, 111, 112
Urban, Joseph, 130, 151, 170, 313, 334
Van Hoven, Frank, 257, 258, 259
Van and Schenck, 251, 256
Veidt, Conrad, 204, 331
Viennese Operetta, =161–173=
Wagner, Richard, 312, 313
Walthall, Henry, 329, 333
Ward, Artemas, 120
Warner, H. B., 331
Watson, Harry, Jr., 134, 251, 257
Wayburn, Ned, 151
Weaver, J. V. A., 124
Webster, H. T., 221
White, Pearl, 327, 328
Whiteman, Paul, 70, 89, 93, 99, 100, =103–104=, 106
Williams, Bert, 135, 146, 208
Williams, Herbert and Wolfus, 251, 257
Williams and Walker, 152
Wilson, Edmund, 136
Winninger, Charles, 138, 139, 208
Winter Garden, =139–141=
Withers, Charles, 257, 258
Wodehouse, P. G., =165–169=
Woollcott, Alexander, 181
Wynn, Ed, 181, =183–185=, 196
Young, Stark, 52, 53, 234 f, 235
Ziegfeld, Florenz, =129–146=, 151, 153, 170, 309
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.
Halftone patterns in some illustrations could not be entirely obscured.
Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of pages, have been collected,
renumbered, and placed just before the Index.
The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references. It was not always possible to determine whether or not some
references were in boldface.
“Strawinsky” is spelled that way throughout this book.
Page 209: “surexcess” was printed that way.
Page 219: “gettings” was printed that way.
Page 379: “Indominatable” was printed that way.
Page 395: “Cæsar, Irving” was mispelled here, but spelled correctly on
the referenced page.
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