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BOOKS BY GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
ANOTHER BOOK ON THE THEATRE

BOTTOMS UP

A BOOK WITHOUT A TITLE
THE POPULAR THEATRE
COMEDIANS ALL

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COMEDIANS ALL

GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

New York ALFRED • A • KNOPF Mcmxix

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''ill,
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY vN.* t *'

ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

PRINTER ID TBI V

>g ,,: .yGOOglC

A BOOK OF
CONTRADICTORY CRITICISM

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CONTENTS

Criticism 11

The Dramatic Critic 11

Destructive Criticism 13

The New Scenery 28

The Matter of Adaptation 29

Skating on Thin Ice 36

The Actor-Manager 38

On Observation 39

Maeterlinck as Dramatist 40

Intelligence and the Actor 52

The One-Act Plat 54

The Japanese Plat 55

The Birxical Plat 57

The Foremost American Producer 58

On Sentimentality 68

The Biographical Play 69

The Repertory System 69

Belasco 70

On Banality 72

The Modern French Drama 73

Harry Watson, Jr. 76

Brander Matthews 78

The American Dramatic Criticism 85

Drama 94

Roof Shows 94

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CONTENTS
Avery Hopwood 106
The Pothoilermakers 111
The Drama of Ideas 116
Hokum 118
The Star System 119
The American Negro 133
The Shaw Imitation 134
On Drama and Acting 135
Subterfuge 135
War, Peace and the Drama 136
The Critical Stricture 137
The Actor Plat 142
The Drama of Augustus Thomas 143
Sentiment and Avoirdupois 144
The Religious Play 145
La Von d'Or 147
Plays of Caste 148
The Protean Play 149
On Aesthetic Dancing 150
W. Somerset Maugham 151
The Risque Britisher 154
Vaudeville 155

Two Celebrated American Character Actors 155
The Journalistic Hazlittry 157
True Sentiment and False 162
Personality and the Actor 163
Double Entente 167
J. M. Barrie 169

Episode in the Career of a Critic of the Drama 169
Haddon Chambers 174
The Palais Royal Naturalized 176

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CONTENTS
Satire 177

The American Sentimentality 178
The Artificial Plat 178
The End of a Perfect Dane 178
Amour in the Theatre 188
The Broadway "Literary" Playwright 189
Eugene Walter 190
The Well-Mannered Play 192
On Beauty 192
Toujours Perdrlx 195
The Chewing Gum Drama 196
J. Hartley Manners 198
The Comic Motion Picture 199
Art Via the Side-Street 202
The Censor 202
On Critical Prejudice 203
The Commercial Theatre 204
Edward Sheldon 207
Mixed Identity 209
Unfrocking the Pretender 209
The Professor 210
Laughter and the Onion 211
The Broadway Curtain Speech 211
The Realistic Drama 215
Account of a Sample Masterpiece Born of the Great

War 215
The Belasco Technic 217
The Commercial Public 218
On Nomenclature 219
Opera Cohique 224
Dramatic Paradox 226

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CONTENTS
The Fbench and American Taste 226
Temperature and the Drama 229
The Marionette 233
The National Humour 236
The Crook Play 249
The Theatrical Wise Men 251
William Winter 254
Sex Appeal 256
The Pigeon-Hole Plat 258
The Actor and the Trained Seal 258
The Middle-Class Taste 261

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"There is always a place for protests against the
main convention, for rebellion, paradox, partisan-
ship and individuality, and for every personal taste
that is sincere. Progress comes by contradiction.
Eddies and tossing spray add to the beauty of every
stream and keep the water from stagnancy." —
Gilbert Murray.

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Criticism. — Criticism is the art of appraising
that which isn't in terms of what it should be, and
that which should be in terms of what it isn't.
The rest — is mere hand-shaking.

The Dramatic Critic. — The notion that a dra-
matic critic may most easily attract attention to
himself and cut his way to celebrity by expressing
opinions directly the opposite of those held by the
overwhelming majority is ridiculous. The reverse,
indeed, is true. The late William Winter was in
his lifetime, and remains after his death, the most
conspicuous figure in American dramatic criticism;
and he never once in all his career said or wrote
one single thing about the theatre that nine hundred
and ninety-nine out of every one thousand Ameri-
cans did not themselves stoutly believe. The
theory that Shaw achieved notoriety as a critic by
standing counter to the general is the theory of
those alone who either have never read his criti-

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12 COMEDIANS ALL

cisms, or have read them carelessly. In his entire
critical incumbency, Shaw never expressed an opin-
ion- .thaj ytfit ,ppt : fully concurred in by the great
majority/ tift'ltii .public. The only difference be-
;tjfre&ji;Wiwt6r and Shaw — the only essential differ-
•"erice; {Hat is—*is ; lKsrt "Winter became famous by ex-
pressing the mob opinion in terms of the mob, and
that Shaw became famous by expressing the mob
opinion in terms of the few. But, at bottom, the
opinions of both were and are the opinions of die
multitude.

If Winter was absurdly full of such adjectives
as "detestable" and "indecent" when a Pinero sex
play crossed his eye, so was Shaw — as you may find
for yourself by turning, for example, to his
"Dramatic Opinions and Essays," Vol. I, page 44.
If Winter was enchanted by mere empty mob mush,
so too was Shaw — as you may find for yourself
by turning, for example, to his Vol. I, page 70.
And if Winter believed that morals were a part of
art, so also did Shaw — as you may find for yourself
by turning, for example, to his Vol. II, page 449.
The technique and aesthetic of Winter, in the expo-
sition of these typical mob attitudes, were the tech-
nique and aesthetic of Dr. Parkhurst; the tech-
nique and aesthetic of Shaw, in the exposition of
what were intrinsically the same mob attitudes,

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 13
were the technique and aesthetic of Gaby Dcslys.
But, sharp showmen both, their materials, however
diametrically opposed the manner of their mer-
chanting, were fundamentally the same, and funda-
mentally of like mob echo quality.

In short, the surest way for a dramatic critic to
remain in oblivion is to do exactly that which the
theorists prescribe to the contrary, viz., contradict
the opinions of the majority. Some excellent
critics, fellows of Bound sense and searching
theatrical philosophy, have died thus the death of
public inattention. Who of you, for example, has
ever heard of Dr. Louis Allard, sometime of Har-
vard College, of E. Fordham-Spence of The West'
minster Gazette, of Judge Parry and his "Judg-
ments in Vacation," of acute Theodore Lessing,
of C. E. Vaughan, Gustav Rickelt, Maximilian
Harden as Ibsen critic, Joscha Savitz, or D. E.
Oliver?

M

Destructive Criticism. — Of the numerous and
fecund fallacies concerned with criticism, doubtless
the most unremittingly enceinte is that which holds
it a vastly more easy business to blame than to
praise. "Any fool can find fault" has been the

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14 COMEDIANS ALL

cornerstone of protestant retaliation to so-called
destructive criticism for something over two cen-
turies. Upon it have been reared the most sar-
donic animadversions of the Balzacs, Landors,
Coleridges, Shelleys, Addisons, Lambs, Drydens
and Disraelis, the very acuteness and hence lon-
gevity of whose destructive criticism of destructive
criticism might possibly suggest to the more wag-
gish logician that the exceptionally gifted dispara-
gers in point — by proving both what they set out to
prove and, automatically, the reverse — swung the
punitive cowhide so far around their heads that it
nipped their own ears.

That any fool can find fault is, of course, per-
fectly true. But that any fool can find fault ac-
curately, soundly and searchingly is a horse of an-
other colour. So to find fault calls upon and com-
mands a decidedly uncommon talent. And so,
above this, to find fault with such a fault finder
calls upon and commands — as the history of de-
structive criticism emphatically proves — a down-
right genius. Any picturesque but empty dodo
like the late Nat Goodwin can toss off a four-
pound five-dollar book finding fault with every-
thing from the criticism of Dr. Johnson to Edna
Goodrich's mother, but it takes the talent of a Wil-
liam Archer to find searching fault even with a

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 15
single one of Brunetiere's dramatic theories, and
the genius of a Bernard Shaw to find sound fault
with what seemed to be the searching fault which
William Archer found.

The extraordinarily capric quality of the mass of
journalistic criticism in America is due, not as is
generally maintained, to the desire of its writers to
please by indiscriminate praise, but to the utter in-
capacity on the part of these writers to dispraise.
In the theatrical criticism that appears in the native
morning newspapers, the omnipresent note of
eulogy is attributable less to the commentator's wish
to eulogize than to the recognized fact that, given
less man an hour in which to confect an estimate of
a play, gush is immensely more simple of negotia-
tion than diatribe. Every critical writer knows
well the truth of this. When he is lazy, he writes
praise; only when his mind is alert and eager does
he feel himself capable of fault finding. The art
of the careful, honest and demolishing coup de
grace is an art calling, firstly, for an exhaustive
knowledge of the subject under the microscope,
secondly, for an original and sharply inventive
analytical rum of mind, and thirdly, for a wit and
power over words that shall make them whiz
through the printed page. The art of the equally
careful and honest hip-hooray, even at its highest,

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16 COMEDIANS ALL

on the other hand calla upon at least the first two
of these attributes in considerably less degree.

That the art of penetrating fault finding — or
"destructive criticism," as the jay misnomer has
it — is a grant denied the considerable majority of
our journalistic luminaries may be clearly dis-
cerned not only in the lavish bravos and vivas al-
ready mentioned as constituting the bulk of the
daily reviews, but — better still — in the retrospec-
tive and more carefully pondered weekly reviews of
reviews published in the Sunday editions. In these
latter reviews one regularly observes a brave effort
at qualification of the morning-after doxologies
and joss-burnings, a sincere and upright attempt
to expose holes. But what the sum? Generally
little more than a faint barking of amiable dachs-
hunds suddenly disguised as ferocious bloodhounds
— with Eliza already twenty miles away. The no-
tion that this daily journalistic criticism is dis-
honest — a theory cherished by most playwrights
who compose dramas in which the heroine, when
the detective's back is turned, cleverly substitutes
a railroad time-table for the warrant for her lover's
arrest, and by most actors whose eyes have been
alleged by the critic for the Mercure de Hoboken
to be not quite so dreamy as Chauncey Olcott's,
or Louis Mann's — this notion is absurd. The

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 17

American journalistic criticism, whether morning
or evening, is, save in a few notorious instances,
not dishonest; it is, save in a few equally notorious
instances, merely disqualified. It is disqualified
because it honestly essays, when the occasion hon-
estly presents itself, to write razor-keen destructive
criticism and finds itself, because of the supreme
difficulty of the job and its own dialectical short-
comings, sorely confounded. Its toe, eager, well-
aimed and valiant, is poised trembling abaft the
breeches, yet condemned by inhibitory tendons to
lift gingerly and rest content merely to flick a bit
of lint off' the coat-tail.

Consider, for example, such a paper as the pres-
ent New York Globe. The perspirations of this
gazette to compose incisive destructive criticism
when the occasion demands are typical of the per-
spirations of at least three quarters of our Ameri-
can newspapers. And the result of these perspira-
tions is destructive criticism that may be described
as being approximately as destructive as the erup-
tion of a Kiralfy card-board volcano. Even simple
fault finding, fault finding that more or less ac-
curately finds the fault, evades such journalistic
enterprise. In concrete instance whereof, take
some such review as this, culled from die columns)
of the journal named:

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18 COMEDIANS ALL

" 'A Sleepless Night' is a farce comedy of the familiar
Long Island bedroom type, but it achieves something
farce is not supposed to achieve. Jack Larric and
Gustav Blum, who are responsible for the night of in-
somnia, have managed to write much that is satirical
into their farce comedy, and that is inimical to the
piece. Folks that go to see farces don't want to giggle;
they want to laugh out loud, and blush.** Etc., etc

Here, indubitably, was a perfectly honest at-
tempt to write honest destructive criticism that was
honestly merited. But observe the result. The
exhibit in point failed to provoke laughter and,
since laughter is the chief end necessarily sought
by such an exhibit, failed of effect. The com-
mentator appreciated this typically and accurately
enough, yet when he tried to get at the reason for
the failure — when he essayed even the simple busi-
ness of getting whatever thoughts he had about
the case onto paper — he became as one utterly
bewildered and began metaphorically to chase him-
self 'round in circles. Thus, while in his very first
sentence he says that the piece is a farce comedy,
he finds fault with the farce comedy because the
farce comedy achieves something that farce is not
supposed to achieve. Which, obviously, is not
far removed from criticizing "A Wife Without
a Smile" because it achieves something that

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 19
"Charley's Aunt" is not supposed to achieve.
Granting even that the Olyropiodorus in point had
not here become somewhat twisted, what is the
"something" which one observes him astutely fig-
uring out as being inimical and alien to farce?
One observes him astutely figuring that satire is
inimical and alien to farce, thus sagaciously prov-
ing to the doubtless vastly embarrassed Shaw that
his "Androcles" is a gloomy and ill-advised hybrid,
and that such Continental satirical farces as "The
Fat Cassar," "Donatello" and the like are mournful
affairs.

The fault finding which the gentleman now and
eventually negotiates, to wit, that the particular
farce with which he is concerned was not laughable
because while satire may make "folks" giggle, it
cannot make these "folks" laugh or blush, shows
even more clearly the blind and vain critical grop-
ing for the play's actual fault. That satire can-
not make persons laugh aloud (as, for example,
in the demonstrated case, among a hundred or
more others, of de Caillavet's and de Flers' "The
King") or blush (as, for example, in the mayhap
demonstrated case, among a hundred or more
others, of the unexpurgated satirical farce on the
French petty bureaucrat, "La Presidente") is in-
deed by way of being high news.

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20 COMEDIANS ALL

Is it any wonder, therefore, that appreciating
the difficulty of achieving anything approaching
destructive criticism, or even remotely sound fault
finding, the majority of newspapers very frankly
heave a sigh, throw up the sponge and cover their
confusion by the simple expedient of shooting off
very easily contrived volleys of Pollyanna oil? To
be fair to the Globe reviewer, one must at least
praise him for his effort to do the right thing, for
his hard sweating to get at the faults of the play
he was engaged to appraise, for his attempt, how-
ever ill-fated, to brew an appropriately destruc-
tive criticism. But for one Dred Scott who suc-
ceeds even in getting so far with destructive criti-
cism as this Globe Dred Scott has more or less
brilliantly succeeded, one finds a multitude of
Evening Telegram cupids who correctly appreciate
the labyrinthine embarrassments of the job and
genially pass them up with such facile constructive
slow music as

"Mr. Glendinning's attempts to extricate himself from
his sad predicament, into which he fell guiltlessly, thus
seeming to bear out the contention that it is only the
innocent who get caught, were screamingly funny, as
explanations usually are to unfeeling, auditors. It could
not be otherwise. Any youth put under the necessity
of clearing up the mystery and doubt aroused by the

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 21

discovery of one pink-pajamed beauty under the bed-
clothes in his apartment, would be funny just because of
the foolishness of the idea that it could be done. But
two! Oh yes, the other one wasn't in pajamas. No,
she sort of wrapped herself in a flowered kimono and
looked self-conscious. As one of the other characters
delivered the line, 'two was much too much.*

" *A Sleepless Night' was written by Jack Larric and
Gustav Blum. The dialogue is clever and there are
times when it approaches the brilliant. There is a
rapid-fire effect to it that helps in holding interest and
bridges the gaps where the action lags a little. It also
possesses the virtue of not appearing to have been written
merely for the effect of being smart. The spoken words
are all germane to the story. The play is ideally cast
The various actors did their roles to perfection. The
production was staged under the capable direction of
Oscar Eagle."

These assiduously sweet fellows who look in-
variably upon the theatre as a June bride looks
at a lily-bud are, however, comparatively not al-
ways so droll as they would seem. After all, the
species of reviewing which they espouse is not
a whit less trumpery than that practised by the
equally assiduous journalistic Enmenides who
would seem to look not infrequently upon the
theatre (save when it concerns itself with the works
of Percy Mackaye and other representatives of the

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22 COMEDIANS ALL

eighteenth century) as a ravenous bus boy looks
upon the free lunch. The mock destructive criti-
cism of this latter school is fully as jocund as
the mock constructive criticism of the former. As
an example, take on this particular occasion a
single slice from the critical opus in the Evening
Post anent the same farce, "A Sleepless Night."
After a very fierce and savage preliminary charge
upon the absurdly trivial little dingus with tanks,
ten-ton pile drivers, iron shillelahs, large-bore can-
non, dum-dum spears, howitzers and assaftetida
bombs, this mortal pot-shot:

"The story which it endeavors to tell is too silly and
preposterous to come within even the elastic limits of
farce."

This, the Post Garcilasso Vega's carefully calcu-
lated climacteric fetch. But the story, alas, hap-
pens to be fundamentally much the same story as
that of Mr. William Hurlbut's comedy, "Saturday
to Monday," which, upon its presentation by Win-
throp Ames in this very theatre the season before,
was — unless I am very greatly in error — highly
praised as interesting and reasonable by this same
forgetful commentator.

But to argue in defense and explanation of de-
structive criticism as a high form of art that its

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 23
absence from the columns of our newspapers is
often chiefly predicated on want of leisure wherein
carefully to weigh, ponder and reflect, and wherein
to interpret the findings pointedly and with skill
and cunning, is plainly as droll as arguing that
genius is merely a capacity for taking infinite time.
The question is not one of lacking leisure, hut one
of lacking expertness. Turning from the news-
papers to the American periodicals and hooks of
dramatic criticism — all granted time and to spare
for studious reflection — one encounters, with very
few exceptions, a similar disability in the art of
sound fault finding. Apparently appreciating, as
the newspaper commentators appreciate, that sharp
destructive criticism is a rooster too difficult of
winging, our critics of the drama for the more
leisurely brochures take no chances, but sedulously
devote themselves to an attempted concealment of
their shortcomings in enthusiastic articles on such
impressive and safe yokel-magnets as community
theatres, Maeterlinck, the esprit of Yvette Guilbert,
and the value of repertory companies. That these
enthusiasms are often grounded infinitely less upon
calm observation and sound deduction than upon
an unaoquaintance with the topic in hand so great
that it makes fault finding — or so-called destruc-
tive criticism — out of the question, is fairly ob-

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24 COMEDIANS ALL

vious to any one who casts an eye at these bland
uplift professors and their essays. Take, for ex-
ample, Mr. Clayton Hamilton, critic to Vogue.
And take, for example, his recent amorous critique
of Henri Lavedan, a few illuminating passages
from which I herewith make bold to quote:

'Throughout the last three decades, Henri Lavedan
of the French Academy has been recognized as one
of the foremost representatives of contemporary French
dramatic authorship ; and, though his work is intimately
national, he has enjoyed a quite unusual success in the
commercial theatre of this country. The first of his
plays to be presented in America was 'Catherine,' which
was produced by Annie Russell in 1898. Otis Skinner
produced The Duel' in 1906, and 'Sire' in 1911. In
1918, Mrs. Fiske presented 'Service'; and the latest item
on the list, The Marquis de Priola,' has recently been
added by Leo Ditrichstein. Of these five plays, three
have run for not less than an entire season in this coun-
try, and the others have been played for many weeks.
What is the reason for this remarkable success of M.
Lavedan with a theatre-going public that rejects so
many European dramatists of even larger reputation
on the ground that they are 'foreign,' and therefore
not immediately comprehensible?

"The reason is mat Henri Lavedan is to be admired
mainly as a painter of portraits. . . . The American
public is, no doubt, unconsciously attracted by the fact
that M. Lavedan is more sincerely and emphatically

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 25

moral in bis work than any other of his French contem-
poraries, with the single exception of Eugene Brieux.
. . . His method is similar to that of one of the most
honourable authors of our recent English drama; and it
would not be at all beside the mark to describe M. Lave-
dan as the French equivalent of Henry Arthur Jones."
Etc, etc

What have we here, gentlemen? We have — if
you will forgive me the insuavity — flapdoodle.
For what we read is something that should rightly
have been destructive criticism but that has been in-
stead shrewdly palmed off on the layman as "con-
structive" by a critic slick enough to understand
that there is nothing like extravagant praise to
cover and hide inaccuracies. Examining the
Hamilton composition even casually, one finds it a
mass of gushing inexactness progressing with a gay,
jazzy crescendo to a sweet-sour whack on the cow-
bell.

By no first-rate critic in or out of France has
Lavedan ever been recognized as of the company of
Rostand, de Curel, Hervieu, Donnay, Lemaitre —
or even de Caillavet and de Flers. He belongs
rather, as every first-rate critic without exception
has agreed, to the second group containing such
names as Bernstein and Bataille. (We will omit
Brieux and Porto-Riche — and even Capus — for

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26 COMEDIANS ALL

whatever one's personal regard for their eminence,
their positions have been open to debate — and let
us be fair to the Vogue philosopher.) Thus, to
say that Lavedan is one of the foremost repre-
sentatives of contemporary French dramatic author-
ship is relatively as exact as to say that Ludwig
Fulda (though a very talented man) is one of the
foremost representatives of contemporary German
dramatic authorship. Furthermore, Lavedan's
plays, contrary to Mr. Hamilton, have — with a
single exception — not only not "enjoyed a quite
unusual success in the commercial theatre of this
country" but — as Mr. Hamilton may leam if he
will engage the records of the late Charles Froh-
man — have lost a fine pot of money. And the
single exception, "Catherine," will be found from
the same easily accessible records to have achieved
a comparative success less on its own merits than
by virtue of the excellent showmanship and sen-
timental hokum slyly practised in the casting of the
play — a hokum whose adroit press-agenting will
be unfolded to the Vogue commentator by any
theatrical manager of the day. But the reliability
of our impulsive critic is even more simply to be
plumbed in his record that "The Marquis de
Priola" "has been played for many weeks."
Whatever the prosperity of its future, the fact re-

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DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM 27

mains that when Hamilton wrote this, "The Marquis
de Priola" had been playing exactly two weeks.

Let us go on. We now find Hamilton contend-
ing that this quite unusual commercial success (sic)
of Lavedan is due (1) to his ability as a painter
of portraits, and (2) to his moral accent. Yet
"Catherine," Lavedan's one American money-
maker, will be admitted even by Hamilton himself
to contain one of his very weakest portraits, not
only not in any degree to be compared with the
portraits painted by him in the instances of "Lc
Prince d'Aurec" and "Le Nouveau Jeu," but —
more — -not to be compared even with those ex-
hibited by him in bis commercial failures, "Le
Duel" and "Sire" — and possibly "Servir." Again,
to argue that "the American public is no doubt
unconsciously attracted (and here, again, sic) by
the fact that M. Lavedan is more sincerely and
emphatically moral in his work than any other of
his French contemporaries, with the single excep-
tion of Eugene Brieux" is (1) evidently to have
contrived to read an esoteric lewdness into such
a contemporary as Rostand, for instance, and (2)
to believe that the American public was no doubt
unconsciously attracted to so many enormously lu-
crative French plays of "The Girl from Rector's"
order because of their sincere and emphatic Sun-

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28 COMEDIANS ALL

day School aspect. . . . The whimsey of the
Henry Arthur Jones comparison, after the prelim-
inary ecstatic comet solo and cheek-kissing, I need
scarcely expand upon.

The New Scenery. — The theory of the so-called
New Scenery falls to pieces once one takes a sharp
eye to it. The sponsors of the neo-cheesecloth
movement maintain that the best way to fix the at-
tention of the audience upon the play itself is to
subordinate the scenery, and that the best way, in
rum, to subordinate the scenery is to simplify it
to the furthest degree compatible with beauty.
The fallacy lies in believing that stark simplicity
may not be quite as distracting as overburdened
elaboration. Compare the effect upon the atten-
tion of a bleak, empty stretch of gray sea and the
same stretch of sea dotted with myriad gulls and
ships of all descriptions. Which diverts one
hypnotically the more; which the more greatly
cultivates insensibility and inattention to whatever
is passing before one in one's immediate environ-
ment?

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MATTER OF ADAPTATION 29

« 5

The Matter of Adaptation. — Despite the not un-
common assumption that approximately all that U
necessary to the adaptation of the Continental play
is to set the second-act clock back six hours, take
out the bedstead and cast Mr. John Barrymore for
the husband instead of the lover, it is reversely
true that this business of adaptation calls for the
very highest playwriting sagacity and talent.
And it is equally true, by reason of this, that not
more than one such adaptation in every twenty-
five is worth a hoot; and true, further, that what
holds of American-made adaptations holds equally
of the attempts at adaptation made by the Eng-
lish, the Germans, the Austrians, and the French.

It is, with reservations, almost as difficult to
translate a play from one language into another,
and from the viewpoint of one people into that of
another, and from the favour of one nation into
the prejudice of another nation, as it is to write
the play in the first place. A careful scrutiny of
the statistics of the world's theatre for the last ten
years discovers astonishingly few adaptations that,
whether from the artistic or even the commercial
orthodoxy, have been fully successful. And die
figures seem all the more surprising when one ob-

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30 COMEDIANS ALL

serves the very large proportion of failure in the
matter of the adaptation of plays which even in
their original form would appear to have been
automatically pre-adapted, and easily to have been
made ready for an alien audience by a mere scratch
or two of the pen. As, for example, Margaret
Mayo's "Baby Mine," intrinsically a farce to the
French taste, which even the adroit Maurice Hen-
nequin foozled in French adaptation — and, for
further example, Eugene Walter's "Paid in Full,"
intrinsically a comedy-drama to the German taste,
(vide Rudolf Lothar's "I Love You"), which even
the equally adroit Schmieden funked in German
adaptation.

There is surely something more than mere
theatre chance behind the fact that ten more or less
celebrated Continental plays failed in quick succes-
sion in their adapted form when brought to the
American stage, several years ago, by the late
Charles Frohman. For all Mr. Belasco's excep-
tional astuteness as a showman, the "Fable of the
Wolf' ("The Phantom Rival") and "The Lily"
baffled his most shrewdly selected translators. In
France, Synge's "Playboy" (adapted by Maurice
Bourgeois for the Theatre de l'Oeuvre in the
Antoine), Wedekind's "Awakening of Spring"
(adapted by Robert d'Humieres), Moody's "Great

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MATTER OF ADAPTATION 31

Divide" (adapted by the Cazamians), Pinero's
"House in Order" (adapted by Bazalgette and
Bienstock), to say nothing of Shaw's "You Never
Can Tell" and "Mrs. Warren," Hebbel's "Marie
Madeleine," Jose Godina's "In the Gardens of
Murcie," and scores of other such interesting plays
have regularly gone astray. In Germany and
Austria, this has been equally true in the case of
innumerable plays like Gorki's "The Last," Bar-
riers "What Every Woman Knows," Stephen Phil-
lips' "Paola and Francesca," C. M. S. MacLellan's
"Leah Kleschna," Pinero's "House in Order,"
Shaw's "Androcles," and Haddon Chambers*
"Passers-By." And true, as well, has the situation
been in England with a vast number of plays by
the better known among alien dramatists — plays
such as "The Happy Island" (adapted by James
Bernard Fagan from Lengyel), "The Right to
Kill" (adapted by Gilbert Canman from Pierre
Frondaie), "The Turning Point" (adapted by
Peter le Marchant from Kistemaekere), "The
Bread of Others" (by J. N. Duddington from
Turgenev), "The Head of the Firm" (by Leslie
Faber from Bergstrom) — the plays, beyond and
above these, of Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Guimera,
Molnar, Guitry, Bjornson, Sudermann, Di
Giacomo, Strindberg, et al.

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32 COMEDIANS ALL

When an adapted play fails, whether in this
country or in England or on the Continent, it ia
the habitual critical pastime to lay blame for the
demise not upon the adaptation, but upon the
original play: the blame usually taking flower in
the theory that the theme and development of the
original are alien to the philosophy, taste and whim
of the national audience immediately concerned.
In the majority of cases, this is, of course, a mere
braying and wiggling of ears. When a respect-
able piece of dramatic writing fails in adaptation,
the philosophy, taste and whim of the alien audi-
ence are often less at fault than the philosophy,
taste and whim of the adaptor. For example, the
failure in America of the Hungarian Imre Foldes'
"Hallo," adapted by Mr. George Broadhurst as
"Over the 'Phone," and without exception laid by
the critics to the difference in moral attitude on
the part of Viennese and American audiences, was
actually due not to the difference in moral atti-
tude on the part of Viennese and American audi-
ences, but to the difference in moral attitude on the
part of the original author of the play and the
adaptor. How in God's name the difference in sex
moral attitude 'twixt the European and American
audiences could be brought forward as an argu-
ment to account for the local failure of the play

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MATTER OF ADAPTATION 33
when the adaptor by deleting the adultery motif
and substituting therefor a kiss motif had com-
pletely removed any preliminary ground for this
difference in sex moral attitude, is pretty hard to
understand. The failure of the play was due, not
to the fact that an American audience is unsympa-
thetic to gay adultery, but, very simply, to the fact
that the adaptor believed an American audience
was unsympathetic to gay adultery. The effect
and the result were precisely the effect and the re-
sult that would automatically be achieved were
"Peg o' My Heart" to be adapted for French audi-
ences by, say, Pierre Veber and Maurice Remon
and were the MM. Veber and Remon to think to
enchant their Gallic public by deleting the art-
less innocence of the heroine and making her, in-
stead, a fille de joie.

Apart from this adjudging the failure of adap-
tations in terms of the box-office, we observe an
even more striking failure in terms of artistic and
intelligent enterprise. Bernstein's "The Thief,"
for example, though it achieved a considerable
commercial success in its American adaptation,
was in this local reincarnation little more than a
senseless yell potage. The entire meaning and in-
tent of the play — the strychnia of lingerie, to wit —
was slashed out of the text by the adaptor, with me

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34 COMEDIANS ALL

result that what remained was nothing but a ten-
cent detective story culminating in a noisy Bertha
M. day love scene.

If Mr. Granville Barker were entrusted with the
job of bringing Albrecht Diirer's painting of the
"Adoration of the Trinity" to London from Vienna,
it is reasonable to suppose that he would exercise
the greatest care in transit to see that no nicks got
into it. But when Mr. Granville Barker is en-
trusted with the job of bringing Arthur Schnitz-
ler's word painting of "Anatol" to London from
Vienna, what does he do? He does exactly what
nine-tenths of the adaptors do when a work of art
is given into their care. He nicks it up with his
own petty morals and petty prejudices until little
more remains of the original than the frame.
Thus also does an American adaptor like Mr. Leo
Ditrichstein — even though he is one of the best —
slash to pieces Molnar's "Fable of the Wolf," does
an English adaptor like Mr. Cosmo Gordon Len-
nox slaughter de Caillavet's and de Flers* "L'Ane
de Buridan" to make a Frohman holiday and one
like Mr. Arthur Bourchier mutilate Lavedan's
"Duel" beyond recognition, do French adaptors
like the MM. Germain and Trebor scuttle the Ger-
man Robert Reiner's "War" and a German adaptor

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MATTER OF ADAPTATION 35
like Rudolf Presber the French Hennequin's and
Bilhaud'a "Best of Wives."

The trouble with the majority of adaptors, wher-
ever one finds them, is a very simple trouble: they
imagine that adaptation consists primarily in adapt-
ing an alien play to the different taste of a local
audience, where, in reality, adaptation should con-
sist rather in adapting the different taste of a
local audience to the alien play.

Take, for instance, a French farce-comedy like
"Le Rubicon." To adapt this diverting play in
such wise that it would not colour the cheek of an
Anglo-Saxon audience would be utterly to ruin it.
There would be nothing left of it — and it would
unquestionably fail with the first or second per-
formance. But to adapt the Anglo-Saxon audi-
ence to "Le Rubicon" by some such device, say, as
having a squad of supers in policemen's uniforms
rush down the aisle at the final curtain and, after
a denunciatory speech by the jackass captain, pre-
tend to raid the theatre on the ground that the play
was immoral and not fit for an Anglo-Saxon audi-
ence, would be to preserve the play and probably
pack the streets with ticket-boosting Blumbergs,
Rosenblatts and Cohens. By such a process, the
prejudice of a local audience might be simply

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36 COMEDIANS ALL

adapted to the alien play — and all ends aptly
served. For what we thus should have would be,
obviously, the audience brought into impact with
the play rather than, as is general, the play
brought into impact with the audience. What
such an alien audience demands is not, as the
adaptors seem to think, that the characters in the
play shall not condone things which to the alien
audience are base and immoral, but, to the contrary,
that it (the alien audience) shall not condone or
seem to condone those things. This is the point
the adaptor more often than not confuses, or over*
looks entirely.

§6

Skating on Thin Ice. — One of the droll delusions
of our American dramatic critics is that the French
farce writer is without a peer in the form of exer-
cise known as skating on thin ice. The truth of
the matter, of course, is that it is not the French
farce writer that is without a peer in the enter-
prise, but rather the French language. And par-
ticularly the French language in the department of
its daring phrase, simile and metaphor. Skating
on thin ice requires no mental nor inventive dex-
terity or balance when the medium of expression
is already automatically suited to the manoeuvre.

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SKATING ON THIN ICE 37
And yet, even with this immense advantage, the
French farce writer often reveals himself a clumsy
fellow in the handling of delicate situations. The
American Hopwood, working in a stiff and flinty
language, has nonetheless skated over thin ice more
gracefully than such French farceurs as Verneuil,
de Bassan, Candera, Hennequin, Mars, Basset,
Leon Xanrof, Jean Martet, and the jocose Giafferi
and Jean d'Aguzan. Bracco, the Italian, has at
his best glided over thin ice more adroitly than
Feydeau, the excellent Frenchman, at his best.
Schnitzler and Bahr, the Austrians, working in
one of the baldest of languages, have equalled, if
not actualy excelled, the best modern French
skaters at their own game. And even such inferior
craftsmen as the German Lothar Schmidt, in a
language balder still, since unlike the Viennese it
is untouched by French breezes, have in such
pieces as "Only a Dream" turned the trick with
a high prettiness. To any one acquainted with
the ready-made subtleties of colloquial French,
the enormous initial advantage enjoyed by the
French writer over the writers in other languages
must he apparent. Let an American like Hop-
wood write in French and a Frenchman like Coolus
write in English, and we should soon enough see
which was the more expert skater.

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38 COMEDIANS ALL

$7

The Actor-Manager. — The career of the actor-
manager in the English-speaking theatre has be-
come so largely a matter of stencil that it may,
almost without exception, be safely predicted in
terms of three stages. The first stage finds the
actor manager — at fifty still vastly intrigued by his
personal beauty — given to presenting himself in
sentimental drawing-room comedies wherein, by
virtue of an elegant morning coat and a gift for
polite repartee, he succeeds magnificently in win-
ning the affections of the lovely ingenue from the
juvenile. The second stage finds him — nearing
sixty and now reluctantly intrigued somewhat less
by his manly beauty than by his cosmic eminence
— given to presenting himself in biographical
plays wherein, by virtue of an illustrious historical
name, a gray wig, a red plush suit, and alternately
witty and heroic sentiments culled from the mouth
of the dramatized deceased, he succeeds in win-
ning for himself at second-hand all the plaudits
withheld from the poor dead genius in his lifetime.
And the third stage finds him — beyond sixty and
fat, and hence perforce brought to abjure his mir-
ror and think of himself primarily as an actor —

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ON OBSERVATION 39

given, with but minor excursions for old times'
sake, to Shakespeare.

$8

On Observation. — What passes for sharp obser-
vation on the part of even the best of our comic
playwrights is actually most often a mere appre-
hension of some trivial and entirely negligible
phenomenon the novelty of which the critics mis-
take for genuine percipience. Thus, were I, turned
showmaker, to remark in a play that it always
looks like rain through a screen, or that the most
uncomfortable thing in the world is trying to eat
dinner without a napkin, or that there is always
something that sounds drunk about a hansom cab
late at night, or that there are probably not two
persons in the whole United States who know
Little Eva's last name — I should be swallowed as
a playwright with a more or less acute eye to the
idiosyncrasies of the world. Of such perfectly
simple things — a dozen of which occur to the
veriest blockhead every hour — is the so-called
"observation" of our playmakers composed.
Thus, Mr. Avery Hopwood, probably the best
writer of farce we possess, has achieved, in all his

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40 COMEDIANS ALL

farces from beginning to end, little more authentic
observation of, and comment on, contemporary life,
persons, institutions and manners than is contained
in his "Fair and Warmer" line to the effect that
however late one gets to "Siegfried" there is al-
ways one more act. Thus, Miss Margaret Mayo,
in all her otherwise capable work, from first to
last has vouchsafed an eye that has observed little
save that a fire at night seems always to be just
around the corner. All the farce writers we have
— and we have some good ones — have in all their
farces combined presented less genuine sharp ob-
servation of life and less genuine sharp criticism
of that life than is contained in a single news-
paper cartoon of John T. McCutcheon, W. E. Hill
or H. T. Webster.

Maeterlinck as Dramatist. — The pretensions of
Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian, Madame Bla-
vatsky, long since brilliantly stripped in the dis-
cerning essay of Andre Tridon, once more brazenly
unveil themselves in the sequel to "The Blue Bird"
and pirouette before the jury in all their droll
nudity. This sequel, called "The Betrothal," is,
like its stem-play, intrinsically little more than a
George V. Hobart or Walter Browne Broadway

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MAETERLINCK 41

morality show — much more suavely and restrain-
edly written, true enough, yet still of a but slightly
higher level in the way of genuine imagination,
philosophy, beauty, or sound art. It vouchsafes
the same immature vagueness (promiscuously mis-
taken for mysticism), the same gaunt literalness
(likewise confounded with designed simplicity),
and the same dialectic diabetes (similarly confused
with sweetness of viewpoint) that its predecessor
vouchsafed. And it convinces all who in such ap-
praisals are not given to mistaking beautiful
scenery for beautiful drama that its creator is the
most greatly overestimated dramatic writer of our
place and time.

Dealing with the adventures of the adolescent
Tyltyl incidental to his search for an appropriate
mate, "The Betrothal," like "The Blue Bird,"
leaves in one the feeling that something is missing
when at the fall of the final curtain one isn't in-
vited downstairs for strawberries and cake. The
air of a Sunday School entertainment — albeit a
very proficient one — is difficult to get rid of. For
Maeterlinck is the de luxe Sunday School superin-
tendent of the modem drama: an amalgam of an
European John D. Rockfeller, Jr., and Charles
Rann Kennedy, with one of his eyes fastened
piously upon die Aldobrandini Madonna and

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42 COMEDIANS ALL

Sacre Coeur and the other rolling slyly at the Mile.
Arlette Dorgere and the Bouffes Parisians. He
has written phrases and passages of sheer and com-
pelling beauty into the bulk of his work, but — with
minor exception hereinafter to be noted — he has not
to this day in that entire work written a single thing
that has had a single thought in it, or a single won-
der, or a single dream, much above the pitch of bis
own Tyltyl's metaphysic. Beside even J. M. Bar-
rie, and the imagination and fancy of Barrie, he
is mere advanced vaudeville: a literate song and
dance man vainly endeavouring to clog to Mozart's
G Minor symphony.

The true artist is ever a true critic of his own
work. Somewhere in his heart there is a bit of a
critical snicker, a trace of a smile at himself. In
the heart of Maeterlinck, as that heart is revealed
to us, there is only a silk badge and a high hat.
Where a Barrie, say, in a "Peter Pan" — which
Maeterlinck at his best has not approached —
winkingly trots out a tot of two to claim the play
as her own, the Belgian Mrs. Rasputin sets out his
"Betrothal" (a fuddled effort at a kind of "Peter
Pan") with all the deadly soberness of a Method-
ist picnic. The body of this "Betrothal" is re-
lated in terms of the dream dreamt by Tyltyl and
the amateurish content and literality of the writ-

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MAETERLINCK 43

ing might thus be attributed — as in the instance
of "Peter Pan" — to the deliberate and eminently
appropriate attack of the dramatist But never for
an instant can one believe this in the case of Maeter-
linck. The amateurish content and literality of the
dreamless coda to "The Blue Bird" and omega to
this sequel have taught one too much for that.
The amateurish content and the literality of the
writing of "The Betrothal" are not the result of de-
liberation and relevant treatment; they are the re-
sult, purely and simply, of an amateurish and
become sterile mind. Tyltyl awake in "The Be-
trothal" and Tyltyl a-dream in "The Blue Bird"
are the same, and their adventurings are the same,
and the philosophies and imaginations that moti-
vate them are the same. And all are barren, puny,
third-rate. The symbolism of a Destiny that
shrinks to nothingness as life's affairs, by the very
theme of the play, abide by the decisions of this
same Destiny — the magic cap that sees into the
soul of a fanatical miser and discerns in that soul
a great prodigality and charity — the philosophy
that the true worth and profundity of a man's love
for a woman is conditioned on the approval of the
children that are to be born to them — of such im-
penetrable bosh and quack sentimentality is such
a Maeterlinck work as this "Betrothal" all compact.

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44 COMEDIANS ALL

The truth about this Flemish Ekdal pere is that,
aside from his three little one-act plays, "L'ln-
truse," "Interieur" and "Les Aveugles," he has
written nothing for the stage that might contribute
legitimacy to the exalted estate in critical and ar-
tistic favour to which he has attained. And these
little plays — the two best, in particular — were the
fruit of his earlier dramatic years. Founding the
theory of the symbolist drama, he was to reveal
himself incapable of the strength to build higher
upon the cornerstone; and the progressing years
have disclosed him more and more in the light of
a half-squiffy and extraordinarily moony female
Joseph Conrad wildly tossed about and regularly
ship-wrecked on the allegorical high seas. The
Maeterlinck of 1902 and on, the Maeterlinck of
"Monna Vanna" and "Maria Magdalene," of "The
Blue Bird" and "The Betrothal," the Maeterlinck of
Sunday supplement uplift sermons on the lovely
life after sweet death, the Maeterlinck wistfully
smelling at a rosebud while being interviewed in
his ruined castle, the Maeterlinck photographed
atop a hill at sunset looking out to sea like a
moving picture fade-out, the Maeterlinck of the
carefully mussed gray hair and the sad Marie
Doro look carefully cultivated in his eyes — this
is the soul of the true Maeterlinck, the true soul

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MAETERLINCK 45

of the Belgian Belasco, the mark of an artist who
started forth nobly and not without splendour on
the highway of literature and, finding the road
long and winding and full of rocks, calmly sat him-
self down and decided to make easy and com-
fortable winks at the box office, at Mr. Hearst's
opulent pocketbook, and at Dodd, Mead and Com-
pany.

Maeterlinck's neo-romanticist fame, when closely
analyzed, is found to have been the result of a
critical confusion of dramaturgic novelty with
artistic integrity. On the higher plane, Maeter-
linck profited by the delusion much the same as
did, on the lower, the author of the tin-pot "On
Trial." His valiant attempt to disengage art from
the details of actuality, as the phrase has it, has
succeeded in the main only in disengaging himself
from the details of art. If he has divorced him-
self from the details of actuality, he has made the
actual moonlight of the world into a mere spot-
light stage moonlight, and the actual mysterious
stars of the heavens into so many mere miniature
incandescent bulbs. He is not a voice in the wilder-
ness; he is a wilderness in the voice. Words,
words, words — many of them singing and lovely —
but still mere words, words, words. If he knows
the effects he desires to create, his skill is inauffi-

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46 COMEDIANS ALL

cient to permit him to obtain them. His rains im-
press one as falling from shower-baths, and one
detects the stagehand hiding between his printed
lines and obligingly shaking the sheet of tin and
rolling the peas 'round the drum-head to create his
storms. He is, as most always he has been, a poet
sitting bravely and rather splendidly astride the
wooden horse on a merry-go-round, riding in blind
and dogged confidence to a destination in the next
block. He is Beethoven on a mandolin; Rosetti
in passe-partout.

Not long ago, there appeared in one of the maga-
zines a little sketch called "The Master Mind."

"The ghostly darkness of the room" — it went —
"served to heighten the effect of the seance. A
sense of weirdness pervaded everything. The pale,
calm face of the medium contrasted with the awe-
struck countenances of the spectators as the table
rose in the air. Diabolism, mysticism, reigned
supreme. Only one face, boredly indifferent,
seemed out of place. It belonged to the gentle-
man who manipulated the piano wire."

Here, unintentionally, is the best impression-
istic criticism of Maeterlinck and the drama of
Maeterlinck and the audiences before that drama
that I have had the fortune to come across.

Taking Maeterlinck's dramatic writing from first

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MAETERLINCK 47

to last, I cannot resist the conviction that it is, with
the obvious exception of "Monna Vanna" and pos-
sibly "Maria Magdalene," the essay form gone
wrong. The poetic essay, that is. "The delicacy
of technic displayed," wrote the excellent Huneker
of his "Aglavaine and Selysette" back in the drink-
ing days, "is almost inconceivable." One is
tempted rather to say almost invisible. For
"Aglavaine and Selysette" is poetry of a sort run,
as the printers say, solid. There is no more
dramatic technic discernible in its manoeuvering
than there is in the "Anatomy of Melancholy."
The impression it leaves in the playhouse is of a
stained glass window — considerably cracked — mis-
placed in the wall of the late George Edwardes*
Gaiety; of a girls* choir tackling Moussorgsky.

In the critical school that detects in Maeterlinck
a divine fire which sees "the star in the grain of
wheat," I find myself, alas, wearing the dunce's
cap and sitting on a high chair in the same corner
with the Ashley Dukes who observes of Maeter-
linck's advent: "This was the destined hour of the
magician, and Maeterlinck appeared. The ap-
parition was startling, and some critics, seeking
a pompous imbecility to cover their confusion,
named htm 'the Belgian Shakespeare.' In this
fashion Tchekhov might be named 'the Russian

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48 COMEDIANS ALL

Ibsen/ or Hugo von Hofmannathal 'the Austrian
Dante.' Such is the disintegrating force of the
new idea upon the mind of the expert labeller."
The technic of Maeterlinck in his vain attempt to
articulate the subconscious mood through sugges-
tion and symbolic speech — an attempt generally
confused by his admirers with an accomplishment
— is at bottom the technic of roe Futurists and other
such current liberally spoofed art cults. Yet the
same critics who get up steam over the theories
and technic of Maeterlinck gallop to finger the
nose at the theories and technic of the Futurists.
Maeterlinck, in this general enterprise, amiably
recalls Mr. Strunsky's Puh, the Hindu Omega:

"Puh is," we are told, "ultimate. But he is far more
than the last word. He has banished the last word.
Puh is the writer who writes without words. He has
magnificently swept away the narrow conventions of
word-forms, outworn and outgrown traditions. His
thoughts are universal, not subject to time and space,
needing no elaborately false temporal mediums for mak-
ing them known. In fine, Puhism is the science of
awakening thought by suggestion.

"Flith! F-l-i-t-k! Don't you immediately hear in
those two magic words the concentrated autumn wind
sweeping truculently through the brown woods and the
sad scraping of raw limbs against each other? Don't
you see the gaunt tree-trunks scrawling against the

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MAETERLINCK 49

clouds and the shivering rabbit whisking through the
eddying leaves? Or does that picture fail to chime in
with your mood ? Ah ! Puh is adaptable. Flith!
F-l-i-t-h! Hear now a gentle breeze sighing senti-
mentally across the iris-beds along the river and one
pee-wee calling to another in the top of the nearest
willow; see the warm sunlight making patterns along the
hills and flicking the wave-tops with silver.

"Pufaism is nothing more than the adaptation of litera-
ture to the personality of the reader. Besides saving
paper, the author never disagreeably accentuates him-
self, and each reader is left with his chance mood un-
directed and virginally pure. To each his own reac-
tion to Life. What more can we ask of an author than
that he provide his readers with thoughts? And what
more simple and natural than to supply them with their
own thoughts?"

In the aim of the technic of Maeterlinck, the sub-
conscious mood, previously expressed only in
terms of music, found words. But in the aim
alone. For "Pelleas" and "Ariane" — and even
"Monna Vanna" — have for the expression of that
mood deserted their step-parent and gone back
to their real birthplace, the orchestra, and to their
real fathers and mothers hiding in the throats
of the operatic stage.

But if "The Betrothal" roughly strips the
Maeterlinckian pretensions to what may be called
the musicless music-drama, "The Burgomaster of

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50 COMEDIANS ALL

Stilemonde," his latest work for the stage, even
more roughly tears the undeserved purple from the
Maeterlinckian pretensions to an imagination, a
passion and a vision powerful enough to act in the
presence of real prose catastrophe. This last play
is in the most liberal estimate merely second-rate
Broadway "war" melodrama. The name and
fame of its author, of course, have as usual taken
criticism by the nose and there has been the cus-
tomary attempt to ferret out absent virtues. Yet
the work is without dramatic or literary distinction.
Edward Sheldon, a Broadway playwright, could
have written the play better than Maeterlinck has
written it: not only from the point of view of
actable drama but, I venture to say, from the
point of view of literature. Had "The Burgo-
master of Stilemonde" been signed with the name
of some Max Marcin, for instance, it would have
been jestingly charged with all the manifold im-
perfections which, since it has been signed with
the name of the Belgian Amy Lowell, have been
stereotypedly and solemnly accepted as cardinal
excellences.

In conclusion, to repeat and sum up. What-
ever Maeterlinck's debatable eminence in the world
of letters, there can remain increasingly small
doubt that in the world of drama his position —

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MAETERLINCK 51

save in the minor instances of the three one-act
plays already referred to — has been absurdly over-
estimated. To this overestimate, various easily ap-
praisable things have conduced. Literary critics,
whose delusion that any short novel with the de-
scriptions printed in italics, the dialogue indented
and the names of the characters centered consti-
tutes an actable play, have mistaken such of his
typographically mis-set, if in mis instance ex-
tremely praiseworthy, novels as "Pelleas and
Melisande" for effective theatre drama — when,
presented as a play without the blood transfusion
of music, the composition actually constitutes act-
ing drama in the same degree that Fouillee's psy-
chological treatise, "Temperamente et Caractere,"
constitutes a novel. Further, the sedulously cul-
tivated and craftily promulgated picturesqueness
of the man himself and of his life have operated
— very much as the same thing operated on a much
smaller scale in the case of the late Richard Hard-
ing Davis — toward the confounding of values that
habitually infects all the numerous impressible
swallowers of magnificent hocus-pocus. Again
further, the first and largely unweighed (if at the
time understandable) enthusiasms of such first-rate
literary critics as Huneker contrived to affect and
dazzle — as is the wont of literary criticism — much

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52 COMEDIANS ALL

of die subsequent dramatic criticism. And
further still, the man himself struck almost at the
outset of his career the extreme good fortune of
falling in with, and being personally liked by, a
noteworthy group of French boosters. This group
literally "made" Maeterlinck in the same un-
critical way that, on a lower level in the England
of the moment, Swinnerton's and Merrick's close
friends are doing their damndest to "make" diem.

§ 10

Intelligence and the Actor. — To argue that all
actors — or, at least, the great majority of actors —
are numskulls and to prove it is of a piece with
arguing, and proving, that all fat men — or, at least,
the great majority of fat men — perspire. To find
fault with an actor for being a numskull is to find
fault with a philosopher for being intelligent.
Numskullery is one of the essential attributes of
the actor; without it, he is an incompetent in his
profession, a fellow ill-equipped for his life's
work, a soul doomed to ignominious failure.
Imagine an intelligent man — a man like Lincoln or
Gladstone, say — rouging his lips and cheeks, black-
ening his bald spot, beading his eyelashes, dressing
himself up like the top of an old-fashioned mantel-

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INTELLIGENCE AND ACTOR 53

piece and, thus arrayed, swelling proudly at the
handclapping of a houseful of yokels when with a
tin sword he stands at the top of a papier-mache
stairway in a J. Stanley Weyman opus and, yell-
ing "For the glory of La Belle France!" at the
top of his lungs, chases three nervous college-boy
supers back into the wings. . . .

What is often mistaken for intelligence in an
actor is merely a talent for not reading incorrectly
the work of the dramatist. But it actually requires
no more authentic intrinsic intelligence to play, say,
the King in Shakespeare's "Lear" than it requires
to play the oboe in Beethoven's Op. 87. Applica-
tion it does require, yes — and, with application, a
good pair of lungs, a clear speaking voice, a copy
of a pronouncing dictionary, a presence at least ap-
proximating that of Gimbel Brothers' chief floor-
walker, and a measure of experience in testing
these things out upon a brilliantly illuminated plat-
form. But intelligence? Hardly ... The eight
most effective actors on our American stage
graduated to that stage from the respective pro-
fessions of shoe clerk, valet, dog trainer, dry goods
salesman, circus acrobatic clown, clothing-store
sidewalk puller-in, race-track tout and haber-
dasher's clerk.

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54 COMEDIANS ALL

§ 11

The One-Act Play. — It is commonly argued, and
not without a measure of eloquence, that the one-
act form of playwriting is just one-third as difficult
of accomplishment as the three-act form. This,
like many contentions of a kidney, is open to
doubt. It is quite obvious, of course, that it is a
very much easier thing to write a one-act play like
one of Alfred Sutro's than a three-act play like
one of Alfred Sutro's, but it is of course quite
equally obvious that it is a much easier thing to
write a three-act play like one of Alfred Sutro's
than a one-act play like one of Lord Dunsany's.
The critic who appraises a play by its length is
the species of connoisseur who appraises a dinner
by the number of its courses or a shirt by the lib-
eralness of the portion that one tucks into one's
trousers. To judge a work of art by its length
is to believe Schnitzler's "Professor Bernhardi" a
finer thing than Schnitzler's "Christmas Shopping,"
Puccini's "Girl of the Golden West" a more lovely
thing than Brahms' piano concerto in B flat major,
or Rembrandt's "Sortie of the Company of Frans
Banning Cock" a meaner work than the cyclorama
of the Battle of Lookout Mountain.

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THE JAPANESE PLAY 55

$ 12

The Japanese Play.— The delusion that a one-act
play is, by reason of its being a one-act play, ever
a less important creation than a three-act play is
a delusion as persistent as that other critical de-
lusion which has to do with the lack of poetry in
Japanese plays written by Occidentals. Let an Oc-
cidental compose some such play as "The Willow
Tree" and even the more discerning theatrical re-
viewers will find much in it to be cross with, will
lament the unconsonant Western prose of it and the
absence of congruous Japanese melody, will write
comparatively of it that in it (I quote a critical
sample) "not only is there no poetry, but, in the
employment of a device affording unusual oppor-
tunities, there is no original thought, no philosophic
comment upon life, no real satire, and very little
humour." Granting that all this may be quite true,
it remains that there is an equal absence of poetry,
original thought, philosophic comment upon life,
real satire and humour in the Japanese plays by
Orientals. The notion that the drama of Japan
is ever a drama of rare fancy and lovely word
music is a notion ill-founded. And while this,
true enough, may not excuse the Occidental when
he sets himself to the composition of a Japanese

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56 COMEDIANS ALL

play, it is yet manifestly unfair to register against
the Occidental the complaint that his play misses
something in the real Japanese drama that the real
Japanese drama does not itself, save in rare in-
stances, possess.

A careful reading of the plays of the classical
stage of Japan {vide Marie Stopes' "Plays of Old
Japan"; Ezra Pound's notes on Fenollosa and the
Noh; etc.) reveals no more poetry, as you will dis-
cover for yourself, than the American-Japanese
play "The Willow Tree." (The criticism of the
latter play is not on this point, but rather that
it professes loudly to be a fantasy of the Japan
of Hearn and Loti and is in actuality rather a
fantasy of the Japan of Minnie Ashley and Julia
Sanderson, of Lionel Monckton and Leslie Stuart.)
The Occidental playwrights here concerned are
less deficient in the matter of poetry than in the
matter of catching the spirit of the Japanese
dramaturgy. For, as I have said, a survey of
such things as "Sandaihagi," "Kayoi Komachi,"
"Shojo," "Kumasaka" and the like discloses, by
way of beautiful imagery, by way of musical simile
and mellow metaphor, a score of drab tones for
one such wistful and dulcet singing as "like the
bell of a country town *neath the nightfall" (Suma
Genji), a score and more of flat and stereotyped

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THE BIBLICAL PLAY 57

"they are piled like the mountains" ( Tamura) for
one such bit as that describing the withering woman
Ono (Sotoba Komachi), "she is like a dull moon
that fades in the dawn's grip." So far as philoso-
phy is concerned, there is just as much in the Oc-
cidental "Willow Tree" as you will encounter in
any of the authentic Japanese plays. And if there
is no satire or humour in the former, I assure you
there is even less in the latter.

§ 13

The Biblical Play.— The belief that the more the
characters in a Biblical play act and talk like under-
takers the more reverential that play is, is some-
thing I have never been able to plumb. The surest
way in which to destroy the unmatched poetry of
the Bible, to callous the message it heralds and
make it go for naught, is to stage it with actors roll-
ing their eyes to the gallery, throwing back their
hands palms upward and moaning as if in the
throes of a terrible stomach-ache. This is the
Bible in terms of "Ingomar" and a tank-town per-
formance of "East Lynne"; this, reverence in terms
of a Georgia nigger camp meeting; but it is cer-
tainly neither in terms of simple beauty, simple
faith and simple common sense. The conventional

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58 COMEDIANS ALL

theatrical notion that the Bible must ever be read
in the woe-is-me tone and that it were a gross
sacrilege to picture the good Lord Cod as speak-
ing in a voice not exactly like the coloratura basso
of Mr. James O'Neill or some other such Rialto
ham is the offspring of the producers* desire to
coddle the demands of clergymen, church-wardens,
Sunday School teachers and other such tender in-
telligences who never go to the theatre anyway.

§ 14

The Foremost American Producer. — He is a fat,
rosy little fellow in a droll double-breasted over-
coat that makes him look like Hi Holler begauded
for a Sunday call on his best girl. There is about
him always the suggestion that were his coat
pockets to be searched, one would discover in each
of them a large red apple. His aspect and de-
meanour are generally those of a surly small boy
whose teacher has just slapped his hand for laugh-
ing out loud. When perchance this mien passes
and he uncorks a guffaw, the. detonation is like the
roar of the shirt-sleeved Irish lions in a Wilson
Barrett play. He makes himself grand with
creamy-coloured doeskin gloves which — if I have
spotted him accurately — he would seem not to re-

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AMERICAN PRODUCER 59
move even at the supper table; and he is to be

beheld riding around the town in an automobile as
bawdy as a moving-picture actor's. Between the
acts of premier performances he goes out and
stands alone on the curb and diverts himself by
aiming expectorations at distant holes in the pave-
ment. His vanity inspires him to derby hats so
rakishly tight that when he takes them off they
leave on his forehead deep and apparently pain-
ful maroon rings. He seems seldom to open his
mouth to say anything and what he does say — so
far as I am able from personal observation to re-
port — is not especially interesting nor important.
Where he comes from or whither he is going, I
haven't the faintest notion — but I have a notion
that in that round and as- if rural pate of his were
are at this moment the finest ideals, and bravest
ambitions, and most vigorous analytical and critical
virtues to be found in the American theatre.

And I have this notion for all his periodic pro-
mulgation of what seem to me personally to be dull
plays, for all his arch practice of such immemorial
whimsies as the averment that he never reads the
criticisms of his work, for all his having believed
it the thing to invite me to dinner after I had written
a highly favourable foreword to a book of his,
for all the things he does that to my own way of

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60 COMEDIANS ALL

looking at the theatre are not the right things to
do. And why have I this notion of this Arthur
Hopkins? I have it because never once so far in
his career of independent production has he
stooped deliberately to a cheap and shoddy thing;
because his aim, whatever his score as I see it, has
always been the aim of a conscientious artist; be-
cause in pursuit of the achievement of this aim he
has been unwavering and has courageously taken
many a hard smash between the eyes — some, it
seemed to me, deserved and more not deserved;
because he has set himself the goal of a vital drama
vitally staged and vitally played and to reach that
goal has sidestepped many an obviously inter-
mediate and tempting bed of roses with a stead-
fastness and determination not given to many men
in his nation.

In every production that he makes, the man's
ideal is clearly discernible — in his good and bad
alike. The single sound stylist of our theatre,
there is in the plays he chooses and in the manner
of presentation which he schemes for those plays
the one uniform suspicion of accurate form that
reaches the native critical ear. By no means al-
ways so effective a popular producer as, say,
Belasco, his sense of composition is yet intrinsically
of a threefold artistic integrity, delicacy and sound-

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AMERICAN PRODUCER 61
ness. This precise sense of composition, true
enough, is not entirely original with him: it has
been borrowed by him very largely from Reinhardt.
But with the latter' s producing technic he has
adroitly combined the tactical practices of such men
as Victor Barnowski and has filtered what he has
thus appropriated through the sieve of his own judg-
ment and personality. The result has vouchsafed
to us some of the finest productions of the present-
day American stage and — where on occasion a play
and his technic have by the generic nature of the
play made noses at each other — some of the weak-
est. But good or bad, the effort to do the fine
thing at the expense of the hokum thing is ever
apparent. And ever apparent, too, are the effort
at beauty, and the effort at something just a trifle
finer than the next man's effort, and the effort to
lift the American play and the American stage
above the level of the crook and sleuth and German
spy jabberwock on the one hand and the gilt piano
and Chinese sofa and Louis XV spit-jar aesthetic
on the other.

I often wonder where Hopkins gets all the money
to do the things he does after the conscientious and
cultivated fashion in which he does them. If he
has a silent partner, I should like to know die man's
name: he deserves to have the public hear of him.

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62 COMEDIANS ALL

It is easy enough to get hold of a man to back a
French theatre for purposes of personal social ex-
ploitation, or to get hold of a man to back a musical
show for personal physiological purposes, or even
occasionally to get hold of a man to back a first-
rate play for purposes of personal puff as a patron
of the arts. But I have yet to hear — and I want
to hear — the name of mis American who so deeply
and honestly loves the theatre that he is willing
anonymously to hold the bag for any number of
first-rate plays his partner desires to produce, for
any number of first-rate productions his partner de-
sires to make of them, and for any number of
failures that, because the work is first-rate, are
bound to ensue. But this, after all, may be said
to be not exactly my business.

Hopkins has staged Ibsen in die main more in-
telligently than any producer before whom I have
sat. And my poor old hinterspot has been ad-
justed into chairs before all sorts of Ibsen produc-
tions, big, little and medium, in three quarters of
the corners of the world. He is at the present
moment the one single producing manager in the
American theatre who has demonstrated himself
honestly eager to get hold of whatever genuine
playwriting the young American is doing — or is
trying to do — and who is honestly eager to defend

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AMERICAN PRODUCER 63
his faith in it, and who is honestly eager to give
it a fair and fighting chance. And in his hope and
effort to do this, he has received some of his
sorest bumps. * Clare Kummer, turned down right
and left, came to Hopkins. Eleanor Gates came to
him. Moeller came to him. Rita Wellman came
to him. Reizenstein and Mclntyre and Brown and
Housum came to him. And other youngsters by
the score come regularly to him as they might come
to a sympathetic editor or publisher. Some of
them may be — and are — pretty bad, but each gets
a friendly attention. In my somewhat peculiarly
hybrid office of dramatic critic and magazine
editor, I am brought into almost daily touch with
that portion of literary young America whose eyes
are directed toward the theatre. And I have yet
to come across a single such aspirant who wasn't
hoping to pin the trust of his future to Hopkins,
And some of these, unless I am greatly mistaken,
are due to do sound work.

Already in his extremely short career, Hopkins
has rescued from the pigeon-hole of oblivion, and
has produced, the best and most imaginative
dramatic fantasy ("The Poor Little Rich Girl")
that this country has given birth to. He has
rescued from this same pigeon-hole, and has pro-
duced, the most skilful fantastic farce ("Good

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64 COMEDIANS ALL

Gracious Annabelle") and the most adroitly com-
posed biographical comedy ("Madame Sand") and
one of the most interesting of modern North Euro-
pean dramas ("Hie Deluge") and the most promis-
ing serious play come from an American hand in
the last four or five years ("The Gentile Wife").
He is, in his presentation of "The Living Corpse,"
the first to have brought to the American stage the
illuminating method followed by Reinhardt in
dramatic production. He is the first to have
brought over the adjustable proscenium (em-
ployed in "Evangeline"), the first producer to have
devised, by a process of editing, the transportable
pivotal stage (employed in "On Trial"), the first
to have brilliantly adapted to his needs the familiar
so-called sheet, or frontal proscenium, lighting of
Stanialawski (employed in the second act of "The
Gentile Wife*'). His production of "A Successful
Calamity" was physically the suavest production of
social comedy our theatre has proffered. His
production of "La Cena delle Beffe," the finest in
the way of romantic drama. He has, with Robert
Edmond Jones, brought — not in one production but
in the majority of his productions — a new sim-
plicity and new beauty to American stage decora-
tive art, and for the first time a harmony of dress
and scene. He has brought out more hitherto

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AMERICAN PRODUCER 65
buried skill among young professional and amateur
actors and actresses than any other native pro-
ducer of comparative experience. And he has ex-
plored many of these players out of the wallows
of vaudeville and the recesses of tyro joints and
the morasses of cheap melodrama. And, while do-
ing all this, he has, of course, not omitted to make
more than his full share of mistakes, more than
his ample portion of very sour cracks. It is the
easiest thing in the world to find fault, eloquently
and justly, with Hopkins, but then it is always easier
to find fault with a man of ideals than with a man
without them. I can readily pick a hundred things
wrong with Hopkins where I find difficulty in pick-
ing one wrong with Al Reeves. Hopkins says to
me, in effect: "I am trying to do the best for the
theatre that I know how." And consequently Hop-
kins metaphorically bends himself down and
presents to my critical toe a tempting expanse of
rear pant. Reeves frankly says to me, in effect:
"I'm trying to do the worst for the theatre that I
know how." And consequently I find myself
balked. ... It is easy to miss the bull's-eye if the
target at whieh one essays to shoot is twenty times
as far off as one's neighbour's.

The producing theory of Arthur Hopkins, if I
may interpret it for him — the critic at his best

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66 COMEDIANS ALL

is merely the holder-up of a mirror — is, generally
speaking, very simply to invest naturalism with as
much the quality of beauty as is reasonably to be
imagined a part of it. A rose may fall from the
window of a Pullman and light upon a New Jersey
dunghill — a Cossack marching off to war may carry
in a locket the picture of his baby girl — through
the skylight of the tenement one may glimpse the
stars. This producing theory, made by Hopkins
in his polysyllabic essay at self-criticism hight
"How's Your Second Act?" to take on a very pro-
found and esoteric air, is actually as simple as roll-
ing out of bed. And that, of course, is its chief
charm and the reason for its voltaism. Hopkins'
attempt to hocus-pocus it forth in his book as akin
to a black art of one kind or another is merely
that part of him that wears the creamy-coloured
doeskin gloves and rides around the town in the
peagreen gasolene bus. But taking it simply for
what it is, his theory and the accomplishments he
has wrought from it mark the biggest single step
forward that the artistic producing theatre of
America has taken in the last decade.

Here, again, however, have Hopkins and his ef-
forts been met with many a face-making from the
kind of critic whose finger was trained by President
Lowell to thumb his nose where Cod designed that

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AMERICAN PRODUCER 67
it should only pick it. In Hopkins' striving to give
his stage a grace, a style, a natural ease and beauty,
such critics have seen only an empty pose, only a .
mumpsimus, only a trying to do something different
for the sake of its being different. It took twelve
long years- for two of the greatest theatrical pro-
ducers of Continental Europe to gain first the at-
tention, then the sympathy, and finally the warm
and hearty approval of their already civilized
critics and audiences for the theory that it is con-
ceivable that an actor may sometimes properly
speak with his back to Mr. Alan Dale — and Hop-
kins has fondly hoped to turn the trick with the
native Indians in four! But for all the yokel hoots
and rebuffs, he is sticking to the guns of his art
and, if the money behind him holds out, he will in
time succeed as surely as they in Europe have
succeeded. "Do things as they should be done,"
he says on page 61 of his critical autobiography,
"and let the results take care of themselves. We
are not merely tired people with trained bears
anxious to hear the rattle of pennies in tin
cups. ..."

There, gentlemen, sketchily, is your Arthur Hop-
kins. He is no "Master," no "Wizard." He is
just a young fellow with a dream, who fails twice
where he succeeds once, but who feels and knows

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68 COMEDIANS ALL

that to succeed even once, bravely, finely and with-
out compromise, is worth failing fifty times for.
He has had, on several occasions, do harder critic
than I — and he will continue to have no harder —
but even on such several occasions I have felt, as
I shall doubtless continue to feel, the pull of an
uncritical prejudice for a man who — as Mencken
has written in another direction of James Branch
Cabell— is so largely thrown back upon his work
for his recompense; who has tried to produce sound
and beautiful plays and to get upon the stage the
point of view of a civilized man; and who, having
succeeded at the business perhaps better than any
other who has made the same trial, though he re-
mains still poor in actual worldly return, holds this
success a sufficient reward for a self-respecting
artist.

§ 15

On Sentimentality. — Why it is that we Ameri-
cans, a nation of sentimentalists, should demand
sentimentality in our theatre is not easy of de-
cipherment. The one fact does not dovetail with
the other so closely as some believe. The theatre,
first and last, is a harbour of diversion. Like can-
not divert like. An egoist hates an egoist. A
man's sweetheart does not look like his wife. A

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THE BIOGRAPHICAL PLAY 69
restaurant with home-cooking would fail in a week.
A soldier, on furlough, does not spend his time in
a shooting gallery. . . . The French, a nation as
sentimental as we, patronize most liberally plays
that are the reverse of sentimental. The Germans,
an unsentimental nation, cry copiously into their
Pschorrbrau when a modi in a cabaret hits the
quiver note in a barber-shop melody like "Pupp-
chen." . . .

§ 16

The Biographical Play. — The biographical play
is probably of all plays the easiest to write well,
since the playwright's philosophy and wit, attack
and resolution, characters and characterizations,
lay already full-blown before him and require but
the not difficult manipulation of theatrical wires
to set them to dancing. Such dramatic composi-
tion, however, always impresses persons pro-
foundly. Yet it is a more simple thing, I venture,
to write a play like "Madame Sand" (for all that it
approaches to the first-rate in its field) than to write
a tenth-rate play like "Up In Mabel's Room."

§17

The Repertory System. — The best argument
against the repertory system is that it elevates the

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actor over the play. It asks us at regular intervals
to view not a play interpreted by a group of actors,
but a group of actors interpreted by a play. The
repertory system thus fails in the same way that the
Y. M. C. A. athletic system fails. It strengthens
the anatomy at the expense of the soul.

$ 18

Belasco. — The criticism commonly peddled
against David Belasco to the effect that he is sadly
content to devote his virtuosity to the mere further
hegauding and merchanting of the established
hokums of the theatre is like most of the Belasco
criticism, whether pro or con, unwarrantable and
stupid. Whatever may be Mr. Belasco's short-
comings, the easy practice of tried hokums is cer-
tainly not one of them. For the Belasco talent,
quite other than being a mere slick exposition of
such tried and true hokums, is actually a talent —
doubtless the most exceptional talent in the native
theatre—for painstakingly nursing to life theatrical
devices that by all the rules should have been and
should be tried and true hokums, but devices that
mishandling on the part of other playmakers and
producers has caused to go for naught. It is in
this business of drawing the hokum essence out

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BELASCO 71

of hokums the hokum juices of which have previ-
ously eluded his confreres, that Mr. Belasco excels.
This is plainly to be detected in the Belasco trick
of turning failures, whose intrinsic hokums were
left by playmakers and producers to lie dormant,
into hokum-lively successes. There was just as
much hokum at the bottom of Edgar Selwyn's
failure, "Pierre of the Plains," as there is in Mr.
Belasco's success, "Tiger Rose," — but Mr. Selwyn
didn't know how to pop it. "Tiger Rose" is merely
a successful version of "Pierre of the Plains," just
as Belasco's "Peter Grimm" was merely a success-
ful version of Cora Maynard's failure, "The
Watcher," and as Belasco'a "Daddies" is merely
a successful compound of Francis Wilson's failure,
"The Bachelor's Baby," and H. V. Esmond's fail-
ure, "Eliza Comes to Stay."

In this "Daddies," the Belasco hokum nursery
is to be appraised with an especial pregnancy.
Every device that failed to register in the Francis
Wilson play, and every device that failed equally
of effect in the Esmond play, Mr. Belasco has here
carefully poulticed and hot-water-bagged and pilled
into commercial robustness. Stratagems that in the
two failures had all the earmarks of healthy hokum
but that suffered from directing cramps have been
taken over, rolled vigorously across a barrel, had

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their Little Marys massaged and their toes wiggled,
until the Belasco osteopathy has put them firmly
upon their legs. And the result, of course, is one
of the usual Belasco money-makers which, while
characteristically of an utter literary and artistic
worthlessness, is still an equally characteristic
Belasco caesarian sure-fire operation.

§ 19

On Banality. — There is room for banality in the
theatre. It is less a thing for critical groan and
frown than one is often persuaded to believe. The
theatre is an institution wherein one seeks sanctuary
from the furors and stressful inconstancy of life,
wherein one may sit before the doings of a mock
world and sigh oneself into a pleasurable tem-
porary forgelfulness and reverie. Life itself, and
the outside world, thrill and torment the individual
with their ceaseless changes and mist enwrapt ad-
ventures and somnabulisms — a shifting panorama
of art, loves, business, coincidences, triumphs, de-
feats, fears and hopes. From all this the theatre
offers a refuge. And that refuge may, obviously
enough, be had only in spectacles of an antithetical
dulness, flatness and stupidity.

One may amuse and divert oneself only by more

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MODERN FRENCH DRAMA 73
or less violent contrasts. Napoleon, after the
battle of Abukir, forgot himself in watching a cock
fight.

§ 20

The Modern French Drama. — The modern
French play as represented, among others, by
Bataille and Bernstein, remains a triumph of
technical skill over drama. Disclosing an excep-
tional hand for the technique beloved of the pro-
fessors, these pieces, for all the passion of their
content, leave the beholder cold. Spectator at one
of them, one is in the mood of the outcast who
stands shivering in the snow looking through the
window of a room wherein burns alluringly a hot
grate fire. It is a favourite practice of the pro-
fessors to blame this chill not upon the overly
meticulous technique, but upon the theory that the
Anglo-Saxon is intrinsically alien to the meta-
physics and emotions of the Gallic text and hence
unable to comprehend and sympathize with the
thoughts and actions of its characters. This, of
course, is for the most part absurd. The Anglo-
Saxon, whatever his antecedents, is today certainly
no more ulterior to the Gallic processes of thought
and act than he is to the Teutonic, yet the latter
drama, as typified by such not far removed writers

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74 COMEDIANS ALL

as Sudermann, is easily comprehensible to him, as
are its characters and the thoughts and actions of
those characters. If, indeed, the American can-
not encompass the philosophy of passion as it is
expounded in the French drama of Bataille, Bern-
stein, et al., how comes it, on the other hand, that
he is able to grasp it as it is expounded in the
French drama of de Caillavet and de Flers,
Tristan Bernard, Capus, et al.? Whether in the at-
titude of farce or in the attitude of the so-called
problem play, the fibre of this philosophy is, at
bottom, the same. If an-alien can comprehend the
French way of taking passion lightly, why can he
not comprehend the French way of taking it seri-
ously? The divergence from the American ap-
proach to the subject is in each case equally broad.
The truth, of course, is mat this has nothing to
do with the successlessness in America of the
serious French drama. Generally speaking, this
type of Gallic drama fails in America not so much
because of its subject matter as because that sub-
ject matter is treated to a technique so rigid, so
extravagantly corseted and so unremittingly
metronome-like that the evening is deleted of all
those qualities of grace and ease, of flexibility and
digression, that go to make the quality known
locally as "theatre," and in their absence substi-

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MODERN FRENCH DRAMA 75
tute the smell of the drama course lecture room
for the smell of the "show." Like the sight of a
woman wearing velvet in the early morning, this
drama attracts the attention, true enough, but at
the same time induces in one a sense of esthetic
nausea. The Anglo-Saxon success of such so-
called serious Gallic plays as "Camillc" and
"Zaza" has undoubtedly been due to their less
formal technical manner, to their comparative
warmth, in short, to their technical crudities.
Some such more recent play as Bataille's "Les
Flambeaux," on the other hand, tells an interest-
ing story with a great feeling for dramatic
technique and small feeling for theatrical tech-
nique. And some such one as Bernstein's "L'Ele-
vation" suffers from the same shortcoming. Both
put one in mind of a college professor endeavour-
ing to tell a story at a Seeley dinner. The story
is good enough, and the telling of the story is well
thought out; but the effect is as nil. The teller
and the place of telling are not in harmony.

Against plays of mis kidney, we have the more
authentic feeling for the cosmopolitan theatre as
instanced in the case of the Caillavet-Flers "Le
Roi." In such things, the French writer is at his
best. His, then, all the sharp nonchalance and
sagacity that secede from him when his brows

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76 COMEDIANS ALL

wrinkle. French farce of this school is genuinely
merry stuff — not the French farce more generally
known as such in the Broadway playhouses, the
machine-made stuff of Soulie, Veber, Nanteuil,
Faverne, Nancey and Armont and that lot — hut
French farce as represented by the collaborators
upon the piece in point, and by such witty fellows
as the admirable Feydeau, Sacha Guitry, Rip and
Bousquet and Romain Coolus.

§21

Harry Watson, Jr. — That Mr. Harry Watson,
Jr., is one of the finest comic artists of the Ameri-
can stage is demonstrated anew with each succes-
sive year. An alumnus of the same burlesque
troupe that graduated that other excellent comed'an,
Mr. George Bickel, Watson's authentic talents, like
those of his colleague, have long been overlooked
— or if not entirely overlooked, greatly disparaged
— by annalists of the stage who vouchsafe to low
comedy merely a casual and then grudged atten-
tion. Yet the fact doubtless remains that this Wat-
son is an actor of uncommon quality, not a mere
slapstick pantaloon, an assaulter of trousers' seats,
a professor of the bladder, but a mimic of excep-
tional capacity, a pantomimist of the very first

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HARRY WATSON, JR. 77

grade and a comedian of real histrionic parts.
Watson's depiction of the tenth-rate prize fighter,
with its suggestion not simply of such obvious ex-
ternals as speech, walk, et cetera, but with its subtle
revelation of the pug's mind, thoughts and general
singularities, is as admirable a bit of acting as
the native stage has conceded in years. The thing
is searching, vivid, brilliant; it measures with the
best work, in more exalted dramatic regions, of
such capable actors as Arnold Daly or the late
Robert Fischer or Ditrichstein. To see it is to
look into the soul of the cheap bruiser as that
soul has rarely been transcribed to paper. The
half-droop of the one eye, the intermittent Maude
Adams toss of the neck, the setting of the far right
tooth, the disdain of the lip, the nervous knee —
these Watson negotiates with a diplomacy as far
removed from the usual and patent tactic as his
negotiation of the portrayal of the telephoning
commuter is removed from the level of the vaude-
villes.

For some reason or other, the work of such
comedians as Watson is held generally in artistic
and critical disesteem. Why, Cod and the Eve-
ning Post alone know. For among these come-
dians one finds a sensitiveness, an eye to human
nature and a schooling in projection that one en-

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78 COMEDIANS ALL

counters with extreme rarity on the dramatic stage.
The scorn these fellows suffer is part of our na-
tive theatrical snobbery. In England, George
Robey is recognized for the artist he is; in France,
Germain and others like him have received their
portion. But in our country the actor is rated not
so much according to his intrinsic ability as accord-
ing to the ability of the playwright who supplies
his roles. And yet such a comedian as Bickel re-
mains at bottom a more susceptive and penetrating
comic artist than any half dozen Leo Carrillos,
and such a comedian as this Watson a more strik-
ing adventurer in the gallery of human nature and
its portrayal than any double dozen of Russ
Whytals, Robert Edesons, Richard Bennetts and
Howard Kyles.

§ 22

Brander Matthews. — In a uniformly entertain-
ing, if uniformly inaccurate, lecture before the stu-
dents of Barnard College, Professor Brander Mat-
thews not long ago brewed the following up-to-the-
minute philosophies:

"Just as grammar has its conventions," observed the
Professor, "bo the drama, too, has its conventions. In
Japanese tragedy each performer has a (supposedly)
invisible attendant clad in black." They hand a fan,

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BRANDER MATTHEWS 79

lift a cloak — and by the middle of the play you do
not see them. The Mexicans always have the devil
dressed in a United States Cavalry officer's uniform. Is
this any more peculiar than, as I have seen in Irving's
productions, buildings coming down from the sky and set-
tle down on the stage for a change of scene during an act?
Certain conventions are necessary, but some are non-
essential, and these the new scenery is trying to do away
with. There are conventions also of costume — it took
Sir Walter Scott to remove the tall ostrich plumes from
Kemble, playing Macbeth, and replace them with a
single plume. But there are some inescapable conven-
tions. You always expect to leave the theatre in two
hours and a half.* Playwrights, therefore, always con-
dense. The characters say just the right things in the
right order, which is absolutely untrue to life. More-
over, every character always understands everything the
first time it is said! The convention of condensation
leads to that of wit, where every one is as witty as the
author. Take the convention of Shakespeare, where
every character speaks blank verse. This would not be
so in life!"

Let us present the Professor with an examina-
tion paper on these announced conventions of the
drama. And, at the same time, with a convenient
"crib."

First Professorial Convention: "In Japanese
tragedy, each performer has a (supposedly) in-

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80 COMEDIANS ALL

visible attendant clad in black. They hand a fan,
lift a cloak — and by the middle of the play you do
not see them."

Question: Is it true, or is it not true, that the
Japanese stage has to a large extent sometime since
abandoned this convention?

Answer; It is true.

Second Professorial Convention: "The Mex-
icans always have the devil dressed in a United
States Cavalry officer's uniform."

Question; Name more than one or two plays
in which the Mexicans have presented the devil in
such guise.

Answer: The circumstance that the Mexicans
have once, or twice — or even three times — pre-
sented the devil as a United Slates Cavalry of-
ficer makes the dido a convention of the Mexican
stage no more than the circumstance that the Amer-
icans have once, or twioe — or even three times —
presented the Italian as a white-slaver makes it a
convention of the American stage that Italians must
always be presented as white-slavers.

Third Professorial Convention: "Is this any
more peculiar than, as I have seen in living's pro-
ductions, buildings coming down from the sky

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BRANDER MATTHEWS 81
and settle down on the stage for a change of scene
during the act? Certain conventions are neces-
sary, and some are non-essential, and these the new
scenery is trying to do away with."

Question: See above.

Answer: The visible descent of scenery from
the fties was due to no scenic convention, but
merely to bad lighting arrangements. The new
scenery is often lowered into place from the flies
just as was the old scenery.

Fourth Professorial Convention: "There are
conventions also of costume — it took Sir Walter
Scott to remove the tall ostrich plumes from Kern-
ble, playing Macbeth, and replace them with a
single plume."

Question: Was it an invariable and absolute
convention to play Macbeth with tall ostrich plumes
or was not this merely an idiosyncrasy of Kem-
ble?

Answer: It was no more an invariable and
absolute convention to play Macbeth with tall
ostrich plumes in Kemble's time simply because
Kemble so played Macbeth, than it is a convention
to play Macbeth with a St. Louis round haircut in
James K. Hackett's current time simply because
James K. Hackett so plays Macbeth,

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Fifth Professorial Convention: "But there are
always some inescapable conventions. You al-
ways expect to leave the theatre in two hours and
a half. Playwrights, therefore, always condense.
The characters say just the right things in the right
order, which is absolutely untrue to life."
Question: Is this absolutely untrue to life?
Answer: No, this is not absolutely untrue to
life. For example, many conversations in actual
life between (1) two diplomatists, (2) a good news-
paper reporter and, say, a sharp politician or
lawyer, (3) the hostess and her guests at a formal
dinner, (4) a military officer and his aide. Or a
conversation on a definite subject — as in dramatic
dialogue — between some such actual persons as,
say, Frank Harris and Shaw, or Huneker and
Richard Strauss, or even Browning and King.
The notion that conversations in actual life are
invariably full of stutterings, evasions, you-don't-
means, hem's and er's is of a piece with the no-
tion, held by the same theorists, mat an expensive
cigar is always stronger than a cheap cigar and that
an intelligent prize-fighter is more likely to win a
ring battle than a first-rate bonehead. Further,
equally erroneous is the theory that in drama the
characters always say just the right filings in the
right order. More often, of course, are they made

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BRANDER MATTHEWS 83
by the playwright arbitrarily to say just the wrong
things in the right order that the consequent be-
fuddlement may institute and prolong the mis-
understandings, et cetera, essential to the dramatic
action. Examples are at once obvious and plenti-
ful, and range all the way from Hauptmann's "Be-
fore Sunrise" to Richard Harding Davis' "The
Galloper." If the Professor refers to the direct
and consistently relevant dialogue of a play in its
relation to the telling of a single and definite dra-
matic story, he is equally in error when he observes
it to be in striking opposition to actuality. What
play written in recent years has developed a story
more directly than was developed in actual life
the story, say, of the recent Grace Lusk murder
case? To argue that the story of this case, if
turned to the purposes of the stage, would never-
theless be boiled down and reduced to two and
one-half hours is to argue that one may read Ar-
nold Bennett's Gayhanger series in two and one-
half hours if one only skips the "descriptions."

Sixth Professorial Convention: "Moreover,
every character always understands everything the
first time it is said!"

Question: Is this even half-way true?

Answer: No.

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Supplementary answer: If by "understand"
you mean "thoroughly comprehend," there are con-
tradictory instances to be found in hundreds of
plays. A few examples: "Hie Poor Little Rich
Girl,*' Schnitzler's "The Hour of Recognition,"
Perez-dados' "Duchess of San Quentin," Sutro's
"The Two Virtues," Mitchell's "The New York
Idea," etc. If, on the other hand, by "understand"
you mean merely that the ear of this character
always catches what that character says the first
time he says it — a more likely interpretation —
there are contradictory instances also to be found
in hundreds of plays. A few examples :
"Grumpy," "The Professor's Love Story," "The
Gay Lord Quex," "Letty," etc.

Seventh Professorial Convention: "The con-
vention of condensation leads to that of wit, where
everyone is as witty as the author."

Question: Is this even one-third true?

Answer: No. The author more often makes
all of his characters, save one, dolts or semi-dolts,
that his wit, placed in the mouth of the one char-
acter, may appear by contrast to be of an excep-
tional quality. A few examples: Chesterton and
the character of the Stranger in "Magic," Shaw
and the character of Tanner in "Man and Super-

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BRANDER MATTHEWS 85
man," Balir and the character of Each in "Prin-
ciple," Schnitzler and the character of Bemhardi
in "Professor Bemhardi," Wedekind and the char-
acter of Hetmann in "Hidalla," Capus and the char-
acter of Mme. Joulin in "The Two Schools,"
Tchekov and the character of Trigorin in "The
Seagull," etc.

Eighth Professorial Convention: 'Take the
convention of Shakespeare, where every character
speaks blank verse. This would not be so in life!"

Well, credit where credit is due. Let us admit
that here the distinguished Professor negotiates a
real torpedo! For five solid minutes I have tried
to think of someone who in actual life speaks al-
ways in blank verse, and, by all the gods, I con-
fess it freely, I'm stuck! But perhaps only tem-
porarily. Something tells me, has long told me
— that is to say, I have a suspicion — indeed more
than a suspicion, a definite feeling — that the Pro-
fessor himself. . . .

§ 23

The American Dramatic Criticism. — Dramatic
criticism in America, estimating it by and large,
falls currently into either one of two classifications,

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each classification being in turn subdivisible into

three further classifications.

The first classification is what may' be called the
college professor dramatic criticism. The three
subdivisions of this classification are (1) the col-
lege professor dramatic criticism which maintains
that dramatic art and morals are inseparable; (2)
the college professor dramatic criticism which
maintains that dramatic art and the structural
technic of Augier, Sardou, et al., are inseparable;
and (3) the college professor dramatic criticism
which maintains that dramatic art and validity and
integrity of thematic idea are inseparable.

The second classification is the newspaper dra-
matic criticism. The three subdivisions of this
classification are (1) the journalistic dramatic criti-
cism which maintains that dramatic art and morals
are inseparable; (2) the journalistic dramatic criti-
cism which maintains that a drama is a meritorious
drama in the degree that it impudendy breaks away
from the accepted technical traditions of Augier,
Sardou, et al., and (3) the journalistic dramatic
criticism which maintains that a play is a good
play in proportion as the so-called "message" or
propaganda of that play is an opportune one.

Let us consider the theories and practices of
each of these representative schools in turn.

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DRAMATIC CRITICISM 87
First, under the college professor school of criti-
cism — the school of such as the Professors Brander
Matthews, Richard Burton, et al. — the theory that
dramatic art and morals are inseparable. Under
this theory of the inevitable matrimony of art and
morals, we find — what? The unintentional and
obviously preposterous contention that, since morals
are often geographical, dramatic art similarly must
often be geographical. Thus, since the college pro-
fessor school of criticism holds, from the American
point of view, that a justification of adultery is
under all circumstances immoral where the French
point of view holds the reverse, its criticism — obey-
ing this localized attitude — must necessarily hold
a play like Henry Bernstein's "L'Elevation,"
which justifies adultery, a work of dramatic art
relatively and distinctly inferior to a play like
Edwin Milton Royle's "The Unwritten Law," which
condemns adultery. What is art to a Frenchman
is not always art to an American. This, the crit-
ical standard of the professor. Art, to the latter,
is a thing sectional — like baseball, gondola push-
ing or throwing girl babies to the alligators. A
fine drama, like a fine piece of sculpture or a fine
piece of music or a fine painting, may not possess
universality. Thus, in this first theory, we have
die criticism of the Puritan, the chief exponent of

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88 COMEDIANS ALL

which and the father of which in America was that
college professor on an unending Sabbatical year,
the late Mr. William Winter.

Second, the college professor school of criticism
which maintains that dramatic art and the play-
building technic of Augier and Sardou are insepar-
able. This, the school that elevates the stereotyped
drama of Henry Arthur Jones and Augustus
Thomas above the independently imagined drama
of Shaw, Andreyev, Haupbnann, and Galsworthy:
that apotheosizes "The Silver King" over "The Sil-
ver Box" and "The Model" over "Caesar and Cleo-
patra." To this critical school the inanimate archi
tecture of a house is ever of more importance than
the animate persons who live in the house. It
gauges a man's condition by looking at the set-up
of his body, never by investigating carefully his
lungs, heart and bowels. It is, in a word, the the-
ory of pigeon-holes brought to literature, the busi-
ness of pasting old labels on new bottles, the blind
effort to make the modern davenport adhere to the
standards of the ancient horse-hair sofa.

And third, the college professor school of criti-
cism which maintains that dramatic art and valid-
ity and integrity of thematic idea are inseparable.
Here we engage a critical ethic that, stripping it
to the bone, would ask us believe that art and fact

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DRAMATIC CRITICISM 89

are indissoluble, that no man may work out a
beautiful tapestry from a premise unsupported by
the Magna Charta, the law of gravity and the Mann
Act. At one swoop are thus devoured the Haupt-
manns of "Before Sunrise" (vide Professor Frank
Wadleigh Chandler, of the University of Cincin-
nati, opus I, pg. 36) and the Pineros of "The
Thunderbolt" (vide Professor Charlton Andrews
of the State Normal School, Valley City, N. D.,
opus III, pg. 120). At one swoop are thus
chewed to artistic death the great artists who are
guilty of treating only "an incomplete section of
life" 1 as opposed to those who, like Mr. Max
Marcin in "Cheating Cheaters," treat of the whole
majestic panorama, and the great dramatists who
are guilty of "weak and, though reasoned, unreason-
able logic" 2 as opposed to those who, like Mr.
George Hobart in "Experience," are as persist-
ently and desperately logical as a lesson in ele-
mentary addition.

So much, for the moment, for this first of our
two critical academies. Now for the second, the
school of newspaper criticism.

Where, under the initial classification, this jour-
nalistic school is in the mass found to maintain,
like the college professor school, that dramatic art

1 See the latter. 2 See the former.

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90 COMEDIANS ALL

and morals are inseparable, the reasons for the
attitude are here doubtless somewhat more extrin-
sic than intrinsic — and so more readily comprehen-
sible. These reasons are not difficult of decipher-
ment. It is manifestly impossible for a generally
circulated newspaper to toy, however legitimately
from the viewpoint of art, with doctrines which arc-
in the current phrase, 1 not compatible with the
policy of journals "intended for the home." It
is certainly an impossible business policy that
would permit the printing of a review extolling the
theme, viewpoint and treatment of, say, Wedekind's
"Earth Spirit" in the column alongside the big ad-
vertisements of Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup,
Grand Rapids double beds, and felt slippers.
Where one newspaper like the estimable Boston
Transcript possesses the independence to dissociate
the morals of art from the morals of Fairy Soap
and Libby's Home Salad Dressing — and permits
the devil to chase his tail as best he may — there
are fifty who quake in their goloshes at the mere
thought of what N. W. Ayer and Co. would think
of a favorable review of the locally immoral but
universally very beautiful art of Dr. Arthur
Schnitzler.

1 Invented and assiduously expounded by the advertising de-
partment.

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DRAMATIC CRITICISM 91
Coming to the second journalistic classification,
we encounter the school of newspaper criticism that
runs violently counter to the college professor in
hailing enthusiastically almost any play that
brazenly flouts the conventional technic and sub-
stitutes for it a technic that has the air of novelty
— or a technic that is a liberal negation of tech-
nic. This journalistic school, composed largely
of recent college graduates eager to demonstrate
to their erstwhile professors their vigorous inde-
pendence of judgment, holds the Shaw technic
superior to the Pinero for no other reason than that
it breaks away from tradition; and the flash-back
technic of young Mr. Reizenstein's "On Trial" and
the flash-forward technic of young Mr. Guernon's
"Eyes of Youth" superior to the technic of De
Curel for the same reason. This critical group
confounds mere superficial novelty with artistic
progress and, though vastly more applaudable
than the campus critical group by virtue of its
greater openness and hospitality to innovation and
experiment, is yet found to lean so far and so gym-
nastically forward that it is continually touching
its nose to its toes.

In the third classification we have the journal-
istic school of criticism which maintains, often with
superlative gusto, that a play is a good play in the

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degree that the "message" of that play is oppor-
tune. In other words, that a work of art is bounded
this time not by geographical frontiers, but by the
frontiers of time. In short, that a play like the
Messrs. Shipman's and Hoffmann's "Friendly Ene-
mies," or Mr. Thomas' "The Copperhead," is by
virtue of the acute timeliness and hence strong
emotional sy ringing-power of its thesis a more
deserving work of art than some such play as
Brieux's "Les Hannetons" which, while a good
play, has yet nothing in it to stir such emotions as
have been brought by the trend of current events
immediately into the foreground.

These, then, briefly and roughly, are the divisions
and sub-divisions of the bulk of dramatic criticism
as we of the American today observe it. Founded
on the college professor side, upon (1) an almost
complete lack of knowledge of the actual theatre
and the changes wrought therein in the last decade,
(2) a stem disinclination, confounded with poise
and dignity, to accept new things and new stand-
ards, and (3) a confusion of the stage with the
tabernacle pulpit — and founded, on the journalistic
side, upon either (1) a desire to attract notice
through the eloquent championship of a drama-
turgic under dog or (2) a desire to earn salary in
peace and comfort by championing all the upper

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DRAMATIC CRITICISM 93
dogs — this native criticism reveals a bizarre coun-
tenance. It is, on the campus side, a mere very
pale reflex of the criticism of William Archer and,
on the journalistic, a mere equally pale reflex of
the criticism of Clement Scott. I doubt if I ex-
aggerate unduly when I say that neither of these
critical schools has in the last dozen years ex-
pressed a single thought, a single philosophy or a
single recommendation that has assisted an Ameri-
can producer or playwright, however eager and
willing, to improve upon his labours or to elevate
his standards. If our native theatre has in these
dozen years made progress — and that it has made
substantial progress there is doubtless none unwill-
ing to grant — that progress has been made, very
largely, in spite of the so-called constructive criti-
cism mat has been visited upon it. These dozen
years have witnessed the birth of the Hopkinses
and the Stuart Walkers, the Washington Square
Players, the Theatre Guilds, the Provincetown
Players and other small theatre groups, in the
cradle of the newer and finer American stage.
And these births have come about in the face of
the dramatic and theatrical race suicide persist-
ently, if not intentionally, urged by the frowzy-
tradition celebrating campus critics on the one hand
and the surface-novelty celebrating journalistic

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critics on the other. What the American theatre
needs is not more intelligent producers — it has a
goodly share of them — but more intelligent critics.
In all the colleges and newspaper offices of the
land, there are today not more than two or three
men writing professional dramatic criticism who
can write as sound, as sober, and as searching criti-
cism as was expounded in the young producer
Hopkins' vest-pocket pamphlet named "How's
Your Second Act?"

$ 24

Drama. — A theatrical composition which treats
of a variable number of characters at that point in
their lives when they have all just bought them-
selves new clothes.

§ 25

Roof Shows. — That such roof music shows as
Mr. Ziegfeld's "Midnight Frolic" and Mr. Gest's
"Century Whirl" would be more advantageously
placed were they moved downstairs into the theatres
proper and that such theatre productions as, say,
Mr. Morosco's "Cappy Ricks" and Mr. Belasco's
"Daddies" would similarly be benefited were they
moved upstairs onto the roof, I begin to persuade

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ROOF SHOWS 95

myself. I speak, of course, not so much from the
purely critical point of view as from that of the
practical theatre: for from this latter point of view
the gain in such a shuffling of the deck is not diffi-
cult of deduction.

Let us consider, first, the roof music shows.
After reviewing a dozen or more of these ami-
able pastimes in the last few years, I have on each
occasion been brought to the conclusion that they
largely defeat themselves in the very business of
polite aphrodisiac wherewith they seek to cater.
The reason is simple enough. The success of the
music show stage — the stage of the "Black Crooks'*
of yesterday and the "Follies" of today — is pre-
dicated on the polite sensual allure of that stage.
And the polite sensual allure of that stage is pre-
dicated, in turn, on the eternal allure of what seems
to be remote and unattainable. Or in another
phrase, what seems to be illusory and esoteric.
What we engage here is the same thing that the late
Charles Frohman accurately appreciated as ob-
taining in a measure in the dramatic theatre; the
same thing, indeed, that the equally astute Mr.
Belasco appreciates today. It was Frohman's in-
junction to his leading women players, as it is
Belasco's in this day, ever to keep themselves
aloof from the public eye and thus ever to make

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of themselves piquing and mysterious figures.
"Never allow yourself to be seen on the street —
above all, never on Broadway. When you go out,
use a closed cab. Do not allow yourself to be
seen in public restaurants. But if you must dine
out, make it Sherry's. And never allow yourself
to be seen with an actor." That was, in part, the
shrewd Frohman's dictum. That, in essence, is
the dictum, in part, of the equally shrewd Belasco.
When one young leading woman one day disre-
garded the Frohman edict and hoofed Broadway,
Frohman promptly got rid of her. (She has never
since, incidentally, been successful.) When one
somewhat older leading woman one day disobeyed
the Belasco command and became fiancee to an ex-
actor, Belasco promptly released her from his
management (And she, too, incidentally, has
never since been successful.)

The sensual horse-power of a music show is ob-
viously diminished in the degree that the girls are
brought into proximity with the gentlemen sitters.
In the downstairs theatres this is very clearly to
be observed in a comparison of the "Follies" and
its distant New Amsterdam stage with the Winter
Garden and its relatively intimate runway. In
the roof theatres, this horse-power is reduced to
what approaches a vanishing point by bringing

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ROOF SHOWS 97

the girls so close to the audience that barely a trace
of illusion remains. The girls who adorn the re-
mote stage of the Amhassadeurs in Paris get the
snooping American pew-holder by the ear; the same
girls, dancing familiarly at close range in the gar-
den between the acts, merely bring him to uncork
a blue chuckle. A stage of the Hofoperntheater 1
of Vienna, commonly agreed by visiting connois-
seurs to hold the fairest and most fetching wenches
in the world, is farther removed from the audi-
ence than any other operetta stage in the world. . . .
Any music show, however poor, is a certain
success the male members of whose audience go
their several ways at the fall of the final curtain
individually wishing that they had the telephone
number of this or that particular girl. (I appre-
ciate that this isn't precisely the sort of criticism
deeply admired by the Drama League Iliodors but,
as every music show producer knows, it is true.)
And the hankering for this connection is plainly
more fully cultivated by the distance-lends-en-
chantment stratagem of the downstairs stage than
by the present misguided roof move of bringing
the pseudo-lovely one within such close range that
the Louisville and Allentown admirers may cruelly

1 1 of course speak of this theatre at such times as its stage
deserts opera for the lighter music play.

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assess the mirage in terms of devastating grease
paint, moles, gilt teeth, loud perfumery, stocking
seams and hooks and eyes. The most beautiful
woman's beauty diminishes in the degree that it
comes toward the male eye; the most beautiful
woman in the world, scanned nose to nose, betrays
previously unsuspected and discordant blemishes.
And — "les illusions ne sont-elles pas la fortune
du cteur?"

But where this intimacy is highly damaging to
the music show, it is precisely the reverse in the
instance of drama. If the remote Hofoperntheater
stage has been an extraordinarily prosperous oper-
etta stage by very reason of its remoteness from the
stalls, the remote late New Theatre stage was an
extraordinarily unprosperous dramatic stage by
very same reason of its equal remoteness from the
stalls. And since the modern practical dramatic
theatre has increased its fortunes as it has more
and more increased the intimacy of its dramatic
stage and auditorium — going back, in this, to the
auspicial principles of antecedent centuries — one
cannot but believe that, still speaking practically,
this theatre might not augment its financial for-
tunes even more by developing the intimacy to an
even greater degree.

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ROOF SHOWS 99

When Mr. Belasco produces a dramatic piece
like "Daddies," it is assuredly reasonable to as-
sume that Mr. Belasco does so purely and simply
to make money. To believe that Mr. Belasco be-
lieves that a play like "Daddies" is an art-work
and that its presentation will enhance his standing
in the art world, is a gooseberry too sour to suck.
Therefore, since the question is primarily one of
boodle, it is an eminently safe assumption to be-
lieve that "Daddies," were it presented on a roof,
would prove not only a much more amusing show
than it proves to be downstairs, but that, hence, by
way of predicate, it would make much more money
than it makes downstairs. And why? Firstly,
because it would on the roof still appeal to all the
same sentimentalists who admire it in the more
austere nether confines of Thespis and, secondly,
because it would on the roof further appeal to all
those who have no relish for its diabetic pollyan-
naism as it is currently presented. And why
again? Because while those persons who pres-
ently admire it downstairs would admire it equally
upstairs, those persons who presently do not admire
it downstairs would find it a great diversion up-
stairs where — following the Ziegfeld and Gest roof
idea — they might throw balls at the actors, ring

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bells when die dialogue became too swashy, and
squirt siphons at the diabolically cute stage chil-
dren.

Aside from the undeniable facts that such plays
as "Daddies" — and there are regularly dozens of
them along Broadway — would profit more with
roof audiences who were somewhat squiffed than
with the cold sober downstairs shoppers, would
make a better impression, and would hence be
doubly successful, these plays — were they moved
up to the roofs and made the subject of character-
istic roof divertissement — would by this change in
projection draw to them the large number of per-
sons who cannot stomach their idiotic uplifterei in
its current condition of presentation. A man who
presently couldn't be drawn in to see a piece like
"Daddies" with a halter would be delighted to
see it on the 'New Amsterdam or Century roof
where, when Mr. John Cope, eetat fifty-one, comes
out in the role of a college boy, he might stop eat-
ing his chop suey long enough to throw a cane
ring over Mr. Cope's ear or where, when Mr. Bruce
McRae as a great novelist observes that he must
hurry up work on the last chapters of his serial
since otherwise George Horace Lorimer will have
to hold up the presses of the Saturday Evening Post,
he might, in the playwright's absence, in-curve one

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ROOF S H O W-&\ : :."{ltt
of the cotton balls against the "M. McRaVs 'aft-'
pant.

Look at the situation honestly, without hypocrisy,
and tell me if eight out of every ten of the so-
called straight plays annually uncovered along
Broadway might not thus be made much more en-
joyable and profitable. I do not refer, plainly
enough, to the respectable play that every once in
a while contrives to show its head above the Rialto
slopjar, but to the omnipresent exhibition of purely
commercial showshop accent. Thus, such a play
as "Just Around the Corner" that lasts a scant
week in the dramatic rathskeller and induces a
mental morbus might upstairs prove a gay diver-
sion and last many months. For here was excel-
lent roof material gone to waste. Picture the
pleasure that the theatregoing public might gain
by ringing the table gongs on such venerable Ho-
bart mots as the best book to be had in the small
town being a mileage book back to New York, al-
luding to the sheriff as Mr. Marshall and, upon one
character's mistaking Pompeii for a man, causing
another to observe that he died of an eruption!
Picture the immense enjoyment to be procured from
using the little wooden hammers on such goatee' d
hokums as the man kissing the wrong girl in the
dark, the repentant youth from the Reformatory

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JtO?-*;:: COMEDIANS ALL

Vpoli wnonv aiisp'icion of robbing the safe is made
cruelly to rest, and the climacteric nosing out of
the rich villain by the poor pure young heroine!
True enough, one would wear out one's right arm,
but think of the fun.

Take other downstairs plays. Even a play of
infinitely better grade, such as "Moliere," would
be improved by the change. For in the instance
of a play of this better kidney the performance on
the floor in the very midst of the roof audience
would relieve the present performance of much of
its hurtful chill. The effect, on the intimate roof
floor, would be to bring the audience out of its
present twentieth century mood and, by the curious
familistkre potency of theatricalism, make it in
spirit part of the court about the fourteenth Louis.
There would be no loss of respect for the text,
but a subconsciously provoked gain in respect
This trick, in small measure, was utilized by Gran-
ville Barker in his staging of the induction to
Shaw's "Fanny's First Play." Reinhardt, on a
large scale, executed the same plan with great
success in his Kammerspielhaus when, on one
occasion seven years ago, by carrying the scenic
decorations and lighting out into the auditorium he
literally contrived to lift his audiences bodily over
into the milieu of the dramatic characters. In

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ROOF SHOWS 103

Japan, of course, the scheme is familiar. And
William A. Brady, in this country, tried out the
idea very happily in the last act of "Pretty Peggy"
when, by filling a portion of the orchestra chairs
with supers in costume, he converted the balance
of the audience into actors in the scene.

Some years ago, I read in an Italian periodical
devoted to the stage a somewhat analogous sugges-
tion as to vaudeville. The critic here contended
that the trouble with vaudeville was that the vaude-
ville audience was ever shortsightedly regarded
as of the same complexion as the dramatic audi-
ence, whereas it must be plain even to the most
eminent Drama Leaguer that the two audiences are
of as diverse species as jackass and owl. The
Italian critic maintained, therefore, that since
vaudeville audiences are very largely of a piece
with the kind of yokels who, in our country, merrily
spend their holidays in the so-called Steeplechase
Parks getting deathly sick on roller coasters, frac-
turing their ribs in revolving barrels and catching
pneumonia by standing agape in a mechanically
operated blast of wind that blows hats off and skirts
up — that since this is the case, vaudeville audiences
should be handled in a similar vein by the vaude-
ville impresarios. To make vaudeville doubly en-
joyable to these persons, argued the critic, the

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chairs in a vaudeville dive should be so built that
they would drolly collapse when sat upon, that the
hat holders under the seats should impart electric
shocks, that the ventilators under the chairs should
at unexpected intervals squirt streams of water into
the faces of the sitters, and so on.

But to return to the roof music showB. That
these shows would be measurably better placed in
the downstairs theatres must be apparent to any-
one who has sat critically before them. One goes
to a music show, obviously enough, not to hear, as
in the case of a dramatic piece, but to see. There-
fore, where in the potential instance of a roof-
presented dramatic piece like, let us say, "The
Burgomaster of Belgium," it would not matter
much whether one saw the actors or not so long
as one could hear what they were up to, in the in-
stance of one of the current roof-presented music
shows it quite as certainly does matter. That
these music shows would be better placed in a
downstairs theatre where one's view of Lillian
Lorraine was not periodically cut off by the migra-
tory hinter anatomy of a fat Swiss waiter and one's
pleasurable appraisal of Mollie King every other
minute interrupted by the moving across the vision
of the ambulatory person of a Roumanian bus boy,
no one can well contradict. When — as I have

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ROOF SHOWS 105

often written — I am courteously invited by the
management of a roof music show to inspect Mar-
tha Mansfield or Rosie Quinn and then, just as the
lovely virgin shoots out onto the floor, my eye
meets instead with the enormous posterior of a
roving garcon, I am intelligibly provoked.

When I visit a roof show — and I presume that
I am not much different from other men — I visit
it primarily not to hear the so-called music, nor
listen to such accompanying rhymes as "A sweet
French grisett-a, whose name it is Yetta," nor en-
visage tableaux disclosing a scowling chorus man
in a red undershirt and placarded "The Spirit of
Anarchy," but merely and purely, plainly and sim-
ply, to look over the girls. And when my eye is
caressed by a creature sufficiently fetching to take
my thoughts for the moment off such of my habitual
ruminations as the occulsion of the aqueduct of
Sylvius in relation to hydrocephalus, or the ques-
tion of orokinase and ptyalin in the saliva of a
horse, I don't wish to be interrupted. It is dis-
tressing to go to a roof with the notion of getting
the little Quinn and her chemise dance to rid the
tired mind of speculations on the phenolsulphone-
phthalein test and its application to surgical dis-
eases of the kidneys, or with the intention of get-
ting the Mile. King's pretty legs to make one agree-

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ably forget for the nonce such workaday problems
as the genetic study of plant height in phase-
olus vulgaris, to say nothing of the notion of sum-
inability for the limit of a function of a contin-
uous variable, and then find that at the Miss King's
very first knee expose or the Miss Quinn's second
wiggle a nomadic chow main butler, cigar vivan-
diere or winepail porter is shutting the gentle houri
from view.

The august Professor Richard Burton may rather
look at Holbrook Blinn than at Marilynn Miller,
but I call upon such of my somewhat softer
arteried friends as' the Professors William Lyon
Phelps and Archibald Henderson to lift their right
hands to the ceiling, smack the Book, face the jury,
and solemnly on their sacred words of honour
swear that they would do likewise.

Avery Hopwood. — In the concoction of suavely
risque farce, Avery Hopwood usually stands head

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AVERY HOPWOOD 107

lish. There are probably a dozen American farce
writers who can evolve better ideas for their farces
than Hopwood is able to evolve for his; and there
are many who are considerably more fertile in
devising original and more comically impudent
characters and situations. Yet not one of them
can write a farce half so good as Hopwood, since
not one of mem understands his native language,
and the acrobatics of that language, so well as Hop-
wood.

It is this virtue that Hopwood's even most
friendly critics habitually overlook. To praise
Hopwood, as he is generally praised, for his inven-
tion in the way of politely risque situation, is to
praise him very largely for a talent that is not espe-
cially his, since more than one such excellent situ-
ation has been bodily appropriated by him from the
work of this and that European writer. The
amusing Hopwood calendar situation in "Sadie
Love," for example, U a literal borrowing of the
same amusing situation from Sacba Guitry's farce,
"La Prise de Berg-op-Zoom." And the Hopwood
bed-moving situation in "Fair and Warmer" is a
brother to much the same situation in Jean Mar-
tet's farce "Les Ingrats," as the servant situation
in "Our Little Wife" is to the servant situation in
Rip's and Bousquet's "L'Habit d'un Laquais."

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Thus, also, to praise Hopwood, as he is generally
praised, for the originality of his farcical themes
is equally to miss the mark. The soul swapping,
astral body conceit of his poorest farce, "Double
Exposure," for example, was already long familiar
in the German von Scholz's farce, "Exchanged
Souls." But the general failure to praise Hop-
wood for his high cunning in the writing of naughty
English, for his happy knack of selecting precisely
the proper word for precisely the improper place,
is to miss the mark even more widely. For it is in
this gymnastic that Hopwood excels every other
American writing for the farce stage and not only
every other American, but, as I have hereinbefore
pointed out, a number of the talented Frenchmen
as well.

Hopwood knows how to write this risque English
because, first, he knows how to write English. Un-
like his Broadway farce-making competitors, be ap-
preciates that good farce is not to be manufactured
by walking the floor like a caged hyena and shoot-
ing dictation at a stenographer out of the edge of
the mouth. He understands that writing is writing,
and not merely the recording of extemporaneous
conversation. He knows that it is as absurd to sup-
pose that, since a play is to be spoken by actors, the
spoken word of the actors is best to be made to seem

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AVERY HOPWOOD 109

natural through the author's experimental speak-
ing instead of writing that word, as it would be to
suppose that since a waltz is to be danced by
dancers, the leg-work of the dancers is best to
be made to seem graceful through the composer's
experimental dancing instead of writing that waltz.
(That the Mozarts of modern farce, de Caillavet
and de Flers, are an exception in this is a contradic-
tion not especially more pertinent than the circum-
stance that Mozart improvised a strict fugue on the
clavichord at fourteen is a contradiction of the fact
that fugues are made and not bom.) In almost
every word that he writes, Hopwood's discrim-
ination and care are apparent. Like Langdon
Mitchell, he seeks his audience's laughter less
through an intricate joking sentence than through
a single joking adjective. As Mitchell, in his
comedy "The New York Idea," brews a good round
chuckle merely by dropping the adjective "mis-
cellaneous" into an apt place, so Hopwood in some
one of his farces like "Sadie Love," say, turns the
same trick by dropping the little adjective "first"
into an equally apt place. And where one of the
sweating Broadway farce heavers like Mr. Mark
Swan, for instance, works tooth and nail to get a
laugh by laboriously combining a joke from the
Birmingham Age-Herald with the spectacle of a fat

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actress in green pajamas, Hopwood contrives to get

a tripled laugh by the much simpler expedient of

selecting carefully a single peppery, appropriate

verb.

However greatly one of his farces may happen
to vary from the standard he has set for himself —
personally, I believe his "Our Little Wife" to be
his best work — there is little Hopwood writes that I
do not experience a pleasure in contemplating.
Like Victor Herbert, he never does anything with-
out its touch of quality. There is always a cosmo-
politan twinkle of eye, a gay phrase, an amusing —
if, in truth, entirely superficial — hitting on this
or that human idiosyncrasy. Taking his farce writ-
ing by and large, I suppose he intrinsically re-
sembles the young Cuitry more than he resembles
any other Continental. Like Guitry, his comment
on life is most frequently negligible; and like
Guitry, his satiric sense, if he has such a sense,
remains largely invisible; but like Guitry, too, he
can take a sheet of gay tissue paper and with a
fancy adroitness twist it into an exceptionally
jocund foolscap. Born in Ohio, I believe, and
graduated from the college at Ann Arbor, Michigan,
he is paradoxically as Parisian in his writing as this
Guitry. And he is the only man writing risque

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THE POTBOILERMAKERS 111

farce in America whose work has any finish, any
style, or any metropolitan flavour.

§ 27

The Potboilermakers. — In the world of modem
dramaturgy, the English hack takes categorical pre-
cedence over the hacks of Europe and America in
the enterprise of writing bad plays as dully as ia
by human effort possible. The American hack at
his worst is always a cut or two above the English
hack at his worst: however empty his play there
is generally a touch of sharp Americanism, a dash
of vulgar honesty, that catches the ear. And the
French hack or German hack, the Italian or the
Austrian, contributes to his dismal masterpiece at
least a flash of phrase or dim suggestion of quasi-
philosophy. But the English hack reaches heights
of virtuosity in stenciled balderdash unsealed by his
drivelling contemporaries. This is true not only
in the instance of dramatic writing, but in the other
forms of literature; for the English hack novels
of such as the immensely popular Nat Gould are
as far inferior to the American hack novels of such
as the equally popular Harold Bell Wright, or to
the French hack novels of such as the equally

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popular Henri Bordeaux, or to the German hack
novels of such as the once almost equally popular
Heinz Tovote, as the English hack plays of such as
Horace Annesley Vachell are triumphantly inferior
on all counts to the American hack plays of such as
William Hurlbut, or the French hack plays of such
as Lucien Gleize, or the German hack plays of such
as Rudolf Holzer, or the Austro-Hungarian hack
plays of such as Vajda Szinhaz, or the Danish hack
plays of such as Carl Gjellerup, or the Italian hack
plays of —

But no need to continue the tedious catalogue.
Nothing in all the modern writing for the stage at-
tains to the dull splendour of an Englishman writ-
ing at his dullest. At hie worst the Englishman is
as difficult of matching as at his best. Search the
records of current theatrical writing the world over
and one will be at pains to discover equals in the
art of sheer inanity for such British masters of
bavardage and twattle as Jennings, Porter,
Devereux, Worrell, Morton, Hemmerde, Vansittart,
Nielson, Howard, Brandon, Lonsdale, Dunn,
Coleby, Martindale, Pleydell, Fenn, Thurston,
Terry, Raleigh, Hodges, Percival, Harwood,
Vernon, Owen, Parry, Stayton, Frith, Gibson,
Hamilton, Jeans, Lion, Merivale, Chilton, Ellis,
Can, Denny, Fernald. . . .

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THE POTBOILERMAKERS 113
This last, though American bom, is by personal
vote, long residence, activity, taste and training, as
English as a mutton chop or tight shirt, and a typical
example of the contemporaneous English rubber-
stamp professor. Twenty years ago, this Mr.
Chester Bailey Fernald, then living in the land of
his birth, wrote a first-rate short story and a second-
rate, though rather diverting, one-act play. But
in the nineteen years elapsed he has composed not so
much as a single phrase touched with grace or
originality, with resonance or wit, with melody or
observation or philosophy. The plays he has
written, from "The Moonlight Blossom" to "The
Married Woman," from "98-9" to "The Day Be-
fore the Day," from "The Pursuit of Pamela" to his
most recent "Three for Diana" out of "The Third
Marriage" of Sabatino Lopez, are in each instance
illuminatingly representative of British hackdom on
die flying trapeze.

I do not mean to single out Fernald as the worst
of this sour school, or even the second worst. He
is by no means the worst. But he combines in him-
self so many of the deficiencies and absent qualities
of the present-day British drama drudge that, as
well as any other, he may be selected by way of
horrible example. It is a characteristic of Fernald,
as of his colleagues in the arts of unimaginative

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writing, that he works almost entirely in terms of
the platitudes, treadmills, stock phraseology and
stale literary baggage of the stage. And this habit
is so deeply ingrained that it operates even when
he gives himself over to the transposing of a play
manuscript from one language into another, just as
it operates in like situation in the instance of such
of his fellow doctors of stencil as Fagan, Hicks,
Farquarson Sharp, Bithell, et al. In example
whereof, I append a few examples from the adapta-
tion by Fernald of the aforementioned Italian "II
Terzo Marito" — examples of the substitution of so
many coccygine vaudeville-sketch cackles for what
might, by the simple and obvious means of direct
translation, have been retained as somewhat less
banal and moth-eaten stuff:

1. "The mere sight of you makes me grow younger.
It's like a breath of the sea air!"

2. "You are free; / am free! What is the use of hav-
ing freedom if one cannot make happiness out of
it? Marry me and the world will be just big
enough to hold our happiness!"

3. "I have (dropping her eyes) something to tell you.
When you have heard me, probably you will want
to reconsider your proposal."

4. "I decided to talk the matter over with her once
again. She had insisted that we should not refer
to it again."

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THE POTBOILERMAKERS 115

5. "But under that moon, under those silent stars, with
the music of the waves beneath us. . . -"

6. "How she has changed in a year! She was a child
then; now she is a woman!"

7. "I wrote you not to come until now because I
wanted to give you a chance to think. I wanted
you to be prepared for {pause) what we shall have
to say to each other."

8. "What do you know of life? Nothing! There is
a great, beautiful world still to be opened to you!"

9. "You have had no experience. You are a beautiful
unwritten page."

10. "When I looked into your eyes — I can see your eyes
every night whenever I close my own in the dark —
the first time I looked into them and every time since
— something has happened in my heart"

11. "If I talk lightly about the most serious things in
the world, it does not mean that I am frivolous. I
was never so serious in my life. And you are not
going to tell me (gulping) that there is another?"

12. "If you send me off, I shall never get over it as
long as I live!"

13. "My own feelings were a trifle hurt, at first; but
when you explained, I saw that your intentions were
as kindly as they always are."

14. "And what, pray, do you know about me?"

Add to these sentimentalized stencils the injec-
tion of an alien dose of morals, the joke about the
practise of exchanging duplicate wedding presents,
the joke about the climate of England, the joke

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116 COMEDIANS ALL

about married persons fighting with each other, and
the joke about woman's habit of changing her mind,
and one achieves a fair idea of the Fernald opera-
tions in adaptation. I have seldom laid eyes on
a sadder job. The Italian original, true enough,
is in the most liberal accounting a third-rate effort,
but Fernald has dexterously plunged it thirty pegs
farther down the scale. He has changed the in-
calescent Italian lover into a cool cockney
cucumber; be has turned the saucy widow into a
dour Prince of Wales's Theatre clothes-horse; he
has removed the gin from the cocktail in Acts III
and IV; he has written over the Italian phraseology
into the phraseology of the commonplace London
curtain-raiser. In the original, a kind of high-
comedy matrimonial "Baby Mine" — though in no
sense and in no degree so adroit or humorous a
work as Miss Mayo's — the play is revealed in this
typical British hack adaptation as a windmill turn-
ing furiously in a dead calm.

§ 28

The Drama of Ideas. — The theatre, for all the
whoops and hopes of its academic whifflers, is
actually the last place in the world for the exposi-
tion of ideas. The so-called drama of ideas — using

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THE DRAMA OF IDEAS 117
the word idea in its strictest sense — is as much an
anomaly as California Rhine wine. Imagine even
the tremendous genius of a Shakespeare deducing
from the influence of the conception of evolution on
philosophy a sober play that wouldn't put its
audience to sleep. Imagine Hauptmann a Newton,
de Curel a Haeckel, Dunsany a Thomas Hobbs —
and then imagine sitting through their dramatic
stage conclusions. The drama of ideas must be —
in fact, is — merely a drama of inklings. It must
be, by its intrinsic soul, even in its highest forms,
less a substantial projector of such ideas as Vernon
Wollaston's on the variation of species, Lange's on
the emotions, Durkheim's on the division of labour
or Tarde's on anti-naturalism than an amiable
juggler of such easy speculations and second-hand
quasi-philosophies as Andreyev's on the burden of
religion, as Dunsany's on fate, as Brieux's on
heredity and Galsworthy's on social economics.
One genuine idea, expounded soberly and soundly
without the hocus-pocus of stage tinsels, would
suffice to crowd the nearest blind pig to the doors
fifteen minutes after the rise of the first curtain.

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118 COMEDIANS ALL

§ 29

Hokum. — Probably nowhere else do the popular
playmakere of Broadway reveal their imaginative
shortcomings so clearly as in the employment of
what is known colloquially as hokum. In particu-
lar, comedy hokum. This species of hokum, or
positively provocative comic antic, these play-
makers scarcely ever embellish, scarcely ever
elaborate, scarcely ever trick out in fresh gauds or
overhaul. Year in and year out, and (though still
largely sure-fire) become drably stereotyped and
threadbare, this hokum of tripping over the door-
mat, throwing an imaginary object into the wings
and having the stagehand thereupon strike a gong,
and the like, is promulgated in all the glory of its
venerable whiskers. The rubber-stamp hokum of
the guignol who gets his hand stuck in the decanter,
who under the guise of camaraderie gives his com-
panion a staggering whack across the shoulder
blades, who emphasizing a point stamps on his
confrere's toe, who bends himself in at the middle
as if anticipating a boot from the rear, who peeking
into a window painted on the back-drop winks over
his shoulder at the audience as if he were spectator
of saucy didoes , transpiring within — these play-
makers provide season after season. And yet more

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THE STAR SYSTEM 119

novel hokum, and doubtless by virtue of its com-
parative freshness more telling hokum, were readily
improvised. For example, the droll mule who
moves aside his finger-bowl and dips his fingers
grandly in the demi-tasse. For example, the gabby
Polonius who, just as he has worked up to full
eloquence, drops his pince-nez in the soup. For
example, the vengeful hanswurst who very, very
slowly lifts up his foot in order to bring it down
hard on his neighbour's great toe, suddenly with a
seraphic grin lets it fly, and, while still grinning,
feels it descend with an awful crack on his own.
For example, the vir borealis who lifts the telephone
receiver off the hook and, without calling a number,
enters forthwith into the midst of a very intimate
conversation. . . .

§ 30

The Star System. — Some fifteen years ago and
still in the critical egg, it was one of the major di-
versions of my almost ceaseless indignation regu-
larly to deride and pummel the so-called star system
of the American stage. Against this system and its
personages I was wont to discharge profoundly
manufactured dialectic and abuse, supported by
what then seemed to me to be exceedingly san-
guinary epigrams, deadly mots and bomb-like

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similes and metaphors. Let a physiologically
choice young woman, newly graduated to stage
eminence from some managerial love sofa, show
herself in anything more than the merest eight-point
advertisement, and promptly I had at her with some
such very ironical definition as "Star: A heavenly
body." And let a Figaro somewhat less capable
than Forbes-Kobertson or Moissi, but possessed of
two-inch eyelashes, be elevated overnight by some
astute impresario from the part of the butler to any-
thing more important than friend to Bassanio, and
I was upon the poor fellow with something like "A
proficient actor is one who is successful in com-
pletely immersing his own personality in the role
he is playing; a star actor, one who is successful in
completely immersing the role he is playing in his
own personality." And having thus performed
upon these poachers and depredators, I would
chuckle myself to sleep and arise early the next
morning to detect the death rattles and watch the
star system roll over, gasp, and die. But each
morning, much to my chagrin and utter incompre-
hension, the impersuasible stars and their Bystem —
for all my seemingly (insurmountable objections —
appeared to get stronger and rosier. For the more
assiduously and sarcastically I would lay to the
night before with cutlass, machine gun, cup custard,

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THE STAR SYSTEM 1^1

broom handle, dynamite, axe, old slipper, field
pieces and pea-blower, the more would I hop out at
suncrack to view the enormous stacks of corpses and
be dumf ounded to hear only a peaceful, rhythmic,
and apparently very comfortable snoring.

But I was young then, and not disheartened.
For two — three — years, I kept at the job, hurling
soft puddings and bricks, fashioning biting pro-
nunciamentos, installing secret wireless stations on
the roof, brewing devastating repartees, and shoot-
ing off thousands of lethal things like "Why these
extravagant hymns to Madame Sarah Bernhardt be-
cause she possesses the courage to appear on the
stage with a wooden leg? A leg is approximately
but a one-sixth part of the human body. There are
therefore any number of star actresses amongst us
who, in the matter of woodenness, have the Madame
beaten six to one." And not only did the stars
themselves daily come in for my mortal comments
— as for example, "An actor is one who cannot act;
a star actor, one whose exceptional virtuosity in
this direction has brought him recognition from a
manager" — but also the audiences who, against my
expressed wish, seemed to rush to see the stars in
such numbers that I was compelled to take a side-
street to get to my home. Of the women who went
to make up these audiences I would caustically ob-

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serve that they fell into two classes: those who
thought that James K. Hackett was too grand for
words, and those who thought that James K. Hackett
would be too grand for words if he got his hair
cut. And of the masculine element, that die three
greatest star comedians in America were (1) Dan
Daly; (2) Thomas Q. Seabrooke; and (3) the man
who could laugh at Frank Daniels. And of the
programs handed to these audiences (nothing was
out of the range of my pig-balloon), that they were
devices subtly employed by theatrical managers to
persuade the audience to believe that the play it
was about to see was going to be acted — or, again,
that they were pamphlets circulated by the producer
to assure the audience that the theatre was dis-
infected of germs with C N Disinfectant and the
play disinfected of drama with actors.

To reinforce this epigrammatic front line, I
would then hustle up from the rear a heavy
artillery of smoking similitudes and analogies,
among them such cartouches as the likening of this
star actress' carriage to a buckhoard and that star
actor's vehement articulation of grief to a long train
of freight cars in the act of unbuckling. But the
more I performed, the longer grew the lines at the
box-offices of the houses wherein the stars were
playing and the more the newspapers gave over

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THE STAR SYSTEM 123

their pages to the public's insistent demand for
interviews in which the star actresses explained how
difficult it was for inexperienced and innocent
women like themselves to act sophisticated roles of
the Camille and Zaza type and how (business of
shuddering) it was therefore necessary for them to
take up with one of these creatures in order closely
to watch and study her. And so great presently
became the popularity of the heterogeneous stars
and the public's relish for them that it was a rare
Sunday newspaper that gave one-tenth the space to
the Philippine muddle and the Nan Patterson case
that it devoted to this star's confession that she was
originally a well-known society girl of Roanoke,
Va., or to that star's opinion that women should not
smoke in public. Photographs of star actresses'
Chinese hounds and star actors' "country homes" at
Bay Shore, Long Island, edged the pictures of
James R. Keene's Sysonhy, Adlai E. Stevenson's
birthplace and the hotel clerk who had discovered
that Maxim Gorky and the lady were not married,
off the first page — and interviews in which star
actresses told how much moral good was being done
by the play in which they were acting crowded
Delmas' remarks back opposite die Siegel-Cooper
advertisement. Thus, of an already lusty seed, did
the star system of the popular theatre — for all the

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hogsheads of vinegar I poured upon it — blossom
to its present sweeping proportions. And why?
Very simply, because in spite of such amiable
clowns as the Nathans of a decade and a half ago
and the Hamiltons of the present day, this star
system is not the pox claimed for it, but actually
a very valuable, a very sound, and very prophylac-
tic institution.

The steadily increasing success of the star system
is a tribute to the superior critical sagacity which
the mob, as opposed to the so-called cultivated
minority, on very rare occasions evinces. It was
the American mob that got the proper measure of
Maeterlinck while the minority was still extolling
him as a second Shakespeare. It was this same
mob, that, on another level, detected the photo-
graphic virtues in Charles Hoyt and George Ade and
George Cohan while the minority saw in the first
only a cheap farce writer, in the second only a
slangy buffoon and in the third only a very cocky
young man who was given to singing about the
American flag through his nose. And it was this
mob again, and not the minority, that first soundly
appraised at their correct values such diverse
native artists as Mark Twain and Montague Glass.
The theatre mob of Washington, in the very teeth
of its critical minority, first detected the virtues in

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THE STAR SYSTEM 125

Barrie's "Peter Pan." The theatre mob of Phila-
delphia, in the teeth of its critical minority, first
detected the vitues in Eleanor Gates' "Poor Little
Rich Girl." The theatre mob of New York, in the
teeth of its critical minority, measured accurately
the virtues of Sheldon's admirable dramatization
of Sudermann's "Song of Songs." It sometimes
happens! And one of these sometimes is vouch-
safed us in the mob's acute realization that, far
from being a damaging vice, the star system has
been one of the most trenchant forces working
toward the prosperity of a better American, or
American-presented, drama and a more elevated
American cabotinage.

Let us consider the situation. Not theoretically,
but in terms of available fact. In the first place,
then, is the star system, even as we at present rather
absurdly have it, inimical to the sound presentation
of good drama? I reply to the question by ask-
ing another. Are such plays as Galsworthy's
"Justice" and "Silver Box," for instance, in any
way deleted of artistic force by the starring in them
even of such variable actors as the Barrymores,
frere et soeur? Are these dramas not actually in-
vested with a greater artistic force by this mana-
gerial emphasis of the leading roles? (When the
dramatist places his emphasis upon a certain role

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126 COMEDIANS ALL

— as he does four times in five — why should it be
held an artistic error for the dramatist's producer
to do likewise?) Is the same author's "Strife,"
presented (as it has been) without the stress of
stars, relatively more forceful or more soundly
composed and presented? And are not stars in
such instances of an actual tonic advantage, since
they frequently attract to worthwhile drama many
susceptible persons who might otherwise remain
away?

Again, consider the effect of the star system upon
acting. Germany, Austria and, in considerable
measure, France know no such greatly — and ap-
parently ridiculously — elaborated starring system
as the American. As a consequence, for all one
reads to the contrary in the learned books on the
drama written by the two-building-college pro-
fessors of Mechanical Engineering and Botany, the
general average of the acting in the American
theatre is at present of a quality quite as good as,
if not superior to, that on any of the stages named.
In the entire theatre of Germany and Austria in
the year of the late war's outbreak there were a
number of actors like Schroth, Albert Heine,
Moissi, Grube, Lindemann and Kayssler of a vivid
and exceptional talent; but the absence of an en-
couraging and inspiriting star system had left the

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THE STAR SYSTEM 127

rank and file in a sorry state of under development.
Moissi is a very much better tragedian and char-
acter actor than our star system has developed and
Schroth a better performer of the average straight
rfile, but for every other Germano-Austrian actor
of any authentic grade it is not difficult to name
at least two — and in some cases perhaps as many
as three — American or naturalized American or
Anglo-American actors. Similarly, while the
French actor like Guitry fils, say, is of course a
vastly more proficient farceur than the American,
he is on the whole inferior to the latter in the
other instances of dramatic interpretation. For
one Max Dearly the American stage can boast three
or four equally good, if not better, low comedians.
For one Guitry /fere, the American stage gives you
a twofold correlative talent. Try, for example,
relatively to match French actor for American star
in the instances of Arnold Daly, John Drew,
William Faversham, Walter Hampden, David
Warfield, Lew Fields, Leo Ditrichstein, Fritz
Leiber. . . .

Coming to the women, the case is even more
illuminating. And it is not necessary to support
one's contention with the names of the American
women whose right to stardom has been — or is —
uncontested. Take the cases of those whose

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128 COMEDIANS ALL

status has not been, is not, so fully agreed upon.
And on this plane search Germany or Austria or
France for an actress capable of giving a better,
sounder and more artistically telling performance
than such as-if-too-suddenly manufactured and
professorially scoffed at stars as the Fenwick of
"The Song of Songs," the Ulrich of "Tiger Rose,"
the Starr of "The Easiest Way," the Jolivet of
"Where Ignorance is Bliss," the Stevens of "The
Unchastened Woman," the Reed of "Roads of
Destiny," the Keane of "Romance," the Ferguson
of "The Strange Woman," the Taylor of "Mrs.
Dakon's Daughter." . . . Was Ethel Barrymore's
talent corrupted — was it not rather encouraged to
fructification — by Frohman's starring of her when
she was still an artistically immature and merely
very pretty girl? Would the comedic talent of
Margaret Lawrence, say, be in any way encom-
passed and made sterile if the Selwyns were to-
make a star of her tomorrow?

The objection to the star system is convention-
ally based upon two assumptions — both of which
are false. The first of these assumptions is that
it tends to destroy smooth ensemble performances.
What it actually does in the majority of instances
is precisely the opposite. In example whereof,
take at random any ten or twelve of the more re-

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THE STAR SYSTEM 129

cent companies with and without stars, and com-
pare the ensemble performances of those contain-
ing stars with the performances of those minus
stars. On the star side take, for instance, "Tiger!
Tiger!" "The Saving Grace," "A Successful
Calamity," "Why Marry," "The Very Minute,"
"Redemption," "The Copperhead," "Mr. Laz-
arus," "Kismet," "Madame Sand," "Getting
Married" and "A Marriage of Convenience."
And on the non-star side, for example, "Three Wise
Fools," "Daddies," "The Gypsy Trail," "Hush,"
"A Little Journey,*' "Polly With a Past," "Magic,"
"The Betrothal," "The Devil's Garden," "The
Happy Ending," "Toby's Bow" and "The In-
visible Foe." Compare the one side with the other
and cast your vote, a vote that will assuredly go to
the star productions and one that will be all the
more confirmatory since a fair number of produc-
tions in both lists were made by the same directors
and since, further, a number of the productions
listed on the star side were purposely selected for
the comparatively mediocre quality of the stars
who appeared in them. Thus, unless I am greatly
mistaken in your "ballot, one discovers that the
weakness in ensemble acting, where it exists, has
often less to do with the star system than with the
director responsible for the production.

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130 COMEDIANS ALL

The second characteristic assumption is that the
system, as we have it, is an evil since it is in the
occasional habit of elevating to stardom young
women whose histrionic virtuosity is alleged to be
confined principally either to a pretty face or to
an openness to managerial amour that amounts
almost to Southern hospitality — or to both. This
assumption seems to me to wear two false-faces.
In the first place, to argue that the star system is
intrinsically an evil because certain of the young
lady stars it has manufactured are neither
actresses nor virgins, is, as I see it, of a piece
with arguing that the non-star system is intrinsically
an evil because certain of its male performers are
neither actors nor satyrs. And in the second place,
to believe that it is improbable that a young woman
may be possessed simultaneously of a talent for
concubinage and for acting is to bring into the
argument a morality as alien to an appraisal of
histrionic skill as it is to an appraisal of literature.
The simple truth, of course, is that in America,
as well as in England, and, more especially, on the
Continent, a number of the most proficient actresses
of the present years — to say nothing of the past —
have been graduated to their estate of granted pro-
ficiency out of managerial embraces.

To object to the American star system as a

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THE STAR SYSTEM 131

menace to acting and drama on the ground that it
occasionally (as within the last few months) pops
into stardom a talentless young woman who
achieves star eminence for herself by the simple
means of putting up half the money for the show
or a talentless actor who illuminates Broadway
with his name in Matkowsky capitals hy laying out
twelve thousand dollars is to object to American
hook publishing as a menace to art and literature
on the ground that it occasionally (as within the
last few months) pops into absurd prominence by
means of extravagant newspaper and 'book-jacket
advertising a talentless young man who pays for
his own book and writes personally the high praise
of himself or an equally talentless young woman
who does likewise. The star system, at bottom,
is a sound and serviceable, a logical and natural,
institution. And its frequent abuse may — as I see
it — no more be brought as an argument against
its fundamental worth, validity and integrity than
the frequent abuse of the eyes may he brought as
an argument against the practice of reading. The
star system has proved itself of undeniably sound
commercial design — and whatever brings the
theatre to prosper must in the end, though the end
be far off, he viewed with critical satisfaction.
And if on the more relevant side of artistic design

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the star system has been not always quite so uni-
formly successful, its measure of comparative
artistic success has at least outweighed its measure
of comparative artistic failure. Regarded from
any plane of criticism higher than that from which
one appraises the art of the Sells Brothers, the
art of even the best actor is of course approxi-
mately as authentic an art as that practiced by
Duveen, Knoedler or any other such merchant in
the retailing of masterpieces. But estimating it
merely for what it is, what it stands for, and what
it seeks to accomplish, the star system, for all its
absurdity, is as valuable to the theatre as a pocket-
ful of iron crosses and croix de guerre is to the
general of an army: it is a spur to effort, a teaser
to glory, a something to transfix the gaze of the
great crowd on the line of parade.

Mr. Thomas A. Wise is, in sound criticism, a
not particularly able actor, yet as a star his Fal-
staff is an immeasurably better Falstaff than that
of Wilhelm Diegelmann, who, because he is not
starred in Germany, gives the native professors
an excuse to declaim omnisciently against the
American star system. Madame Nazimova is
similarly a not particularly illustrious actress, yet
as a star her Ibsen performances are immeasur-
ably better than those of Ida Wiist, of Brahm's

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THE AMERICAN NEGRO 133
famous Lessing-Theater company, who — not be-
ing starred in Germany- — provides the local
Brunetieres with still another excuse. Come down
the list a bit, and you will find analogously that
such a local and artistically debatable star as
Ruth Chatterton is, though debatable, yet pos-
sessed of an actually greater skill than such a
French non-star as the Mile. Sylvie who plays in
Paris the same kind of parts that the Chatterton
plays in New York. And the same thing holds
true in the cases of Billie Burke and Marthe
Regnier. If Desjardins isn't starred in France
and Henry Dixey is starred in America, it is,
quite properly, because Dixey is really the better
and more deserving actor. And if Brule isn't
starred in France and William Gillette is starred
in America in the same kind of roles, it is simi-
larly because Gillette, being the more effective
performer, deserves to be starred.

§ 31

The American Negro. — It is one of the com-
monest delusions that the American negro is by
nature a musical fellow. The truth, of course,
is that he is not at all musical, but rather merely
rhythmical. He has an acute feeling for rhythm,

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134 COMEDIANS ALL

but of music he knows nothing. It is, indeed, as
rare to find a black American who knows anything
about music as it is to find a white American. . . .
The negro, with his unusual sense of rhythm, is
no more accurately to be called musical than a
metronome is to be called a Swiss music-box.

§ 32

The Shaw Imitation. — The average imitator of
Shaw appears to believe that the best way to write
a Shaw play is first to write one's own play and
then — without changing a line of dialogue — by
transfering the names of the male characters to
the women characters and vice versa, to put the
male sentiments in the women's mouths and the
women's ideas in the men's; and, this done, to
cause one character to quote Schopenhauer and
then bring into debate with that character another
character who contrives to floor him with a wheeze
of W. S. Gilbert, soberly expounded.

The fault of Shaw's imitators is that they are
successful in imitating Shaw's garrulity without
being successful in imitating the substance of
Shaw's garrulity. Anyone can easily and success-
fully imitate a dramatist such, for instance, as
Henri Kistemaekers, since the hitter is merely ver-

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SUBTERFUGE 135

bose in a hollow, empty way; but it is another thing
to imitate with any degree of closeness an agile
writer like Shaw. For the more closely a writer
imitates Shaw, the more apparent becomes the wide
difference between them. In example, where a
more successful imitator of Shaw than Wedekind,
or Ilgenstein, or Otto Soyka, or Freksa, or Gustav
Wied — and where figures more distant each in
turn from the original? Or, to turn to Shaw him-
self, where a closer imitator (in "The Phil-
anderer") of the Arno Holz attitude in "Die Sozial-
aristokraten" — yet where two men farther apart?

§ 33

On Drama and Acting. — Drama is the art of ex-
pressing artificially what is felt naturally. Act-
ing, the art of expressing naturally what is felt
artificially.

§ 34

Subterfuge. — It is the common custom of the
playwright who is desirous of exhibiting himself
in the light of a brilliant philosopher but who is
unable to think up anything brilliant to say, to
resort to the theatrical trick of trying to confound
criticism by putting the very best things he is able

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136 COMEDIANS ALL

to think of in the mouth of his hero and then, upon
their being Spoken by the hero, causing another
character to observe that the aforesaid hero talks
like a sophomore.

§ 35

War, Peace and the Drama. — Why a great war
should nine times in ten inspire the contem-
poraneous theatre to little more than the composi-
tion of trivial Phillips Oppenheim-Anna Katherine
Green fables must be explained hy the same per-
son who can tell why a great historical figure should
nine times in ten generally inspire the theatre
to little more than washboiler melodrama (Lin-
coln in "The Ensign"), chasings after scraps of
paper ("Colonel Cromwell"), and superintend-
ings of ingenue amours ("Disraeli") \ The war,
or military, play of respectable quality is born
not of war, but of peace. Where peace gives birth
to a Galsworthy's "The Mob" in England, war
gives birth only to spy-plot pot-boilers like "The
Man with the Club Foot" and "The Live Wire."
Where peace gives birth to Von Beyerlein*s 'Taps"
in Germany, war gives birth only to the same kind
of spy-plot pot-boilers on the stages to the north and
south of the Rosetheater. And for one peace-
time "L'Aiglon" in France, war breeds nothing but

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THE CRITICAL STRICTURE 137
countless spy yellow-backs like "Alsace," just as
for one peace-time Roda Roda's "Feldhermhugel"
in Austria, war belches forth nothing but trash of
the accent of Flamm's "Soldier's Child."

§ 36

The Critical Stricture. — That the wildest im-
probability may be taken for the postulate of a
play is a theory which regularly projects the
majority of our critics into something of a sweat.
They charge the air with gaudy dicta on the unity
of this or that, on the holding up of the mirror,
on the quality of reasonability in the initial pre-
mise and on many other such whim-whams about
which the person seeking amusement in a theatre
gives not a continental. Forgetting, as has often
been pointed out, that, from four hundred and sixty-
eight years before the birth of Christ — when the
most successful play of the day ("(Edipus Rex")
showed its audience a hero who, when he came on
the stage, had been married for twelve years to his
own mother, who, in turn, throughout all that time
had never had a talk with him on the past which
might have given him any suspicion of her indentity
or of the fact that he had murdered his own father
— down to the present time, when one of the suc-

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cessful plays of the day ("Justice") thoroughly
convinces its New York audiences of its local ap-
plicability despite its New York audiences' non-
recognition of section 887 of the Penal Law and
section 2,188 of the Penal Code, which make the
play, from the local and native point of view,
ridiculous — forgetting, as I say, that improbability
has utterly nothing to do with a play's chances
for success and effectiveness, whether commer-
cially or artistically.

One of the most recent plays to come in for such
strictures is — a farce, to boot, mind — the "Good
Gracious Annabelle" of Clare Kummer, a deliber-
ately fantastic affair designed only, by a wild dis-
cbarge of artless humours, to jabberwock its audi-
tors and give them a bit of careless fun in the play-
house. These strictures are not difficult to expect,
since they are ever vouchsafed us by the pro-
fessors when a piece slightly different from the gen-
eral is brought to the community's attention. They
appeared in full force, it is interesting to recall,
when twenty-seven years ago "Paris Fin de Siecle"
was charming the French capital and when "The
Cabinet Minister" was crowding the theatres of
the British. And the critical strictures were in
these instances largely of a piece with the critical
strictures more recently visited upon the entertain-

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THE CRITICAL STRICTURE 139

ing play by Miss Kummer. To object, as objec-
tion ts made, to the antic unreality of Miss Kum-
mer' 9 little play, is to object to the final scene of
Augier's "Le Gendre de M. Poirier" — the best
scene in the play and probably Augier's best frag-
ment of dramatic composition. Another recent
play, "Come Out of the Kitchen," by A. E.
Thomas out of a novel by somebody or other,
concerns itself with a story the same as that em-
ployed by Miss Kummer. And this same story
it handles with a precise regard for all those rule-
books of technic so close to the fancy of the grave
and literal-minded critic. And the result? The
play is not only not one-tenth so amusing as Miss
Kummer' s play, but, into the bargain, it is a sub-
stantial fact that — so far as the story goes — "Come
Out of the Kitchen" actually isn't one-half so
convincing as the latter! Mr. Thomas elects to
treat the fable of the aristocrat turned servant as
rational comedy; Miss Kummer elects to treat it
as moonstruck farce. The theatrical value of the
latter approach must be at once patent. By initi-
ally assuring the audience that the theme is quite
absurd, Miss Kummer needs only, to achieve suc-
cess, concern herself with making her spectators
laugh. To the contrary, by initially assuring the
audience that the theme is a semi-serious one, Mr.

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Thomas (being no Oliver Goldsmith) is com-
pelled through the rest of the evening not only to
devise ways and means to amuse his spectators, but
in addition must waste a considerable and valu-
able portion of his allotted two hours in per-
suading his audience periodically of the reason-
ability of his characters and his characters' ac-
tions. The difference 'twixt the two entertainments
is, therefore, the usual difference 'twixt local
comedy and farce. The former is more often
than not merely the latter without a sense of hu-
mour.

Again, contrary to the prevalent critical notion
that Miss Rummer's plays are (I quote the ga-
zettes) "diffuse," "formless," "loosely and care-
lessly knit" and "of an irresponsible and slipshod
technique," the truth is that for all their surface
appearance of formlessness and technical in-
felicity they actually follow a very definite and
symmetrical design. To say that the plays would
be better plays were they of a more symmetrical
construction is arbitrarily to say that the straight
street of a city is a more lovely place to linger
in than a crooked country lane. Miss Kummer's
plays, if the word formlessness must be used, are
formless not in the sense that a bad piece of
literature is formless, but in the sense that a good

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THE CRITICAL STRICTURE 141
piece of literature — the "Professor Bemhardi" of
Schnitzler, say, or the "Weavers" of Hauptmann,
or the "Peter Pan" of Barrie, or the "Pasteur"
of Sacha Guitry, or, to descend in the scale, one or
two of the farces of Hoyt — is formless. Formless-
ness is frequently not a fault, hut a virtue of rich
blossom. Consider, in fine, Strindberg's "Dream
Play" . . . Chopin's sonata in B flat minor . . .
the poetry of Yeats. . . . The work of Miss Kum-
mer, if it lacks technique, lacks technique in the
sense that a little child dancing merrily to a spring-
time hurdy-gurdy lacks it — and, contrariwise, in
the sense that Gertrude Hoffmann possesses it.

Not less ridiculous than these criticisms of Miss
Kummer's work are the majority of criticisms
directed against Langdon Mitchell's dramatization
of Thackeray's novel, "Pendennis." It has been
made the subject of vigorous critical objection that
Mr. Mitchell has, in his dramatization of the novel,
omitted all drama. Which, in view of the circum-
stance that in the novel itself there is no drama
(i. e., drama of the spasm sort mat physics pleasur-
ably what Thackeray himself was fond of allud-
ing to as "that great baby, the public"), seems
just a trifle like lamenting that Rostand, in pre-
paring the story of Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac
for the stage, did not make the play more romantic

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for Coquelin's and Mr. Mansfield's lady admirers
by giving Cyrano a more lovely nose.

To object to a dramatization of "Pendennis" is
an objection truly not without a measure of com-
mon sense. But to object to an undramatic drama-
tization of "Pendennis" is to object to Paderewski
because be doesn't play the violin. Mr. Mitchell's
purpose was to lift Thackeray onto the stage. It
was apparently Mr. Mitchell's critics' desire that
he lift the stage onto Thackeray. The notion that
the stage, then, is not the place for an undramatic
story such as this, is the sort of notion that would
bar from the theatre all manuscripts like "Anatol"
and "Patriots" and welcome in their stead chiefly
such as "The Queen of the Opium Ring" and "The
Witching Hour."

§ 37

The Actor Play. — An actor views a play not in
terms of composite drama, but in terms of its in-
dividual roles. It is consequently not unnatural
that we find that when an actor composes a play
for his own use he more often than not writes a
luxuriant part for himself and completely forgets
to write a play around the part. When an actor
attempts the negotiation of satire, an especial
marasmus is on the world. Actors have written

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AUGUSTUS THOMAS 143

successful drama, comedy, burlesque, farce — but
satire, the edelweiss of literature, has generally
been far above their reach.

The Drama of Augustus Thomas. — The drama of
Augustus Thomas is the condensation of the pro-
tagonist's lifetime into two hours and the expan-
sion of the theatregoer's two hours into a lifetime.
The so-called technique of this playwright is so
perfect that it completely obscures his drama.
Every exit and entrance, every pince-nez that is to
be broken at a critical moment, every bandage that
is to be found germ-infected and bring about a
character's death, is planted with a so thorough as-
siduity that, once the first half of the preparation
is done with, nothing remains but to hang around
and watch the plants work. True, pastime may
be found the while in giving ear to such of the
playwright's tony Broadwayisms as "the chemistry
of motivation," "the chemistry of things spiritual,"
and the like, and to his seriously intended love
scenes wherein the hero informs the heroine, in
voice a-thrill with fervour, that she is "an angelic,
delectable baby" (the quotation — from "Rio
Grande" — is literal!), yet in the main the evening

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reveals itself as a mere lecture by Thomas on
"How To Write A Play," a laboratorical evening
proving to the further satisfaction of the students
of Professor George Pierce Baker that, with pro-
tracted schooling and practice, one may become
sufficiently proficient in what is termed dramatic
technique to write anything for the stage but drama.

§ 39

Sentiment and Avoirdupois. — It is probable that
the refractorily comic aspect of many a play-
wright's sentimental work is often heightened by
the experienced lady to whom the playwright's
producer entrusts the leading role. The lady — so
one on such occasions generally reads in the en-
thusiastic reviews of the play — "is possessed of no
small histrionic skill" and, after witnessing her
performance, one is disposed emphatically to agree.
For so great, indeed, is generally the lady's his-
trionic skill that once she sits upon it during a
sentimental floor scene she is unable subsequently
to get to her feet again without the robust aid of the
leading man.

Sentiment demands slenderness. The moment
sentiment weighs one hundred and thirty-five
pounds, it becomes comedy; the moment it touches

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THE RELIGIOUS PLAY 145
one hundred and thirty-six, it becomes farce; the
moment it touches one hundred and forty, it be-
comes burlesque. The best piece of criticism ever
set to paper in this regard was written by the late
Charles H. Hoyt when he was the dramatic critic
of the Boston Herald. He wrote it after witness-
ing the performance, in a sentimental role, of Miss
Lily Langtry. And this one piece of criticism
doubtless did more for the future American drama
than any thousand pieces of criticism written pre-
viously or since. The day it appeared Hoyt was
promptly discharged — and became a playwright.

§ 40

The Religious Play. — Since the average New
York audience is usually made up for the most part
of Jews, a religious or racial play that abstains
from an excessive adulation of Jewry is predestined
to failure. Such a play stands small chance of
financial success unless it brings down its big cue-
tain on a rosy piece of verbal fireworks in which
Jesus Christ, Disraeli and Jacob Schiff are pro-
claimed as belonging to the same race, and unless
it brings down its final curtain with the discovery
that not Milton Rosenbaum, but the low Patrick
McCarthy, was the man who actually stole the

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money. Any variation of the theme is bound to
offend the tender sensibilities of the theatregoing
Anglo-Oriental. And, further, any variation is
bound to come in for gamy cracks at the hands of
the newspaper play reviewers, since an enthusiastic
record of a play that handles the racial question
without thick gloves would not be likely to drive
crazy with joy the Messrs. GimbeL Altaian, Saks,
Stern, Greenhut, Abraham & Straus, and the rest
of the full-page advertisers.

This attitude on the part of audience and re-
viewer is instrumental in producing a hundred
"Melting Pots" and "Little Brothers" for one "Con-
sequences," a hundred "Houses Next Door" and
"Five Frankfurters" for one play like "The Gen-
tile Wife," a hundred fountains of hypocritical
pulvil for one decent piece of writing that ventures
to look upon its subject matter intelligently, calmly,
decently and fairly. . . . Our popular theatre,
however, is a bizarre institution in any direction
when its stage is occupied with a religious question
— whether that question be Christian, Jew or Bud-
dhist. It sees nothing profane or blasphemous in
presenting the Saviour as a sizzling spotlight ("Ben
Hur") or as the inventor of a death-dealing sub-
marine (in the motion picture "Civilization") or as
an uncouth actor ("The Servant in the House"), yet

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THE RELIGIOUS PLAY 147

it shrinks — particularly in its Mosaic managerial
departments — from such reverent and gentle and
very beautiful things as Brieux's "Faith" and
Andreyev's "Sawa." The obvious sacrilege of
such mossback diddlers as "The Terrible Meek"
and "Marie-Odile" — exhibitions of evil taste
aimed directly at the box-office — it hearkens to in
awe and in devout silence. It views a team of
asthmatic nags toting a papier-mache chariot over a
treadmill or a baby spotlight halo-ing a scheduled
ingenue or a number of stagehands mimicking the
roars of hungry lions as an exalting religious spec-
tacle, while it the meanwhile is somewhat puzzled as
how to conduct its feelings and attitudes toward
such a presentation as Shaw's "Androcles". . . . Re-
ligion, so far as the theatre is concerned, is much
like a cigar. A cigar, however good, is not palat-
able when smoked in the brilliant sunlight. A
religious theme, however sound, is distasteful when
aired in the brilliant glare of the footlights.

§ 41

La Voix (TOr. — That a rich low speaking voice
generally bespeaks generations of cultural breed-
ing and background is one of the commonest of
American-held social and critical fallacies. The

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so-called rich low speaking voice is found in Amer-
ica to be regularly less the inheritance of aristoc-
racy than the inheritance of an engagement in
"The Lady of Lyons," a medical specialization in
women's diseases or a waiting on table in a first-
class restaurant. The speaking voice of Mrs.
Astor in infinitely less "aristocratic" than that of a
third-rate Broadway actress. The speaking voice
of Hamilton Fish, compared with that of a Ritz
headwaiter, sounds like a foghorn.

§ 42

Plays of Caste. — It is the general contention
of American critics of the drama that a play whose
theme relates to British class prejudice and seeks
to exhibit the results of an amorous collision of
caste and proletariat cannot possibly succeed in in-
teresting American audiences since — I quote the
common observation — "in this country there is no
such thing as caste," etc. Such critical flag-wag-
ging is the veriest gibberish. Not only, of course,
is there quite as much class distinction in this
country as in England — if, indeed, not vastly more
— but, what is more directly to the point, plays with
precisely the same basic theme have regularly suc-
ceeded in interesting American audiences. The

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THE PROTEAN PLAY 149
eternal "Iron Master" (with perhaps its American
derivative "The Boss"), "The Lost Paradise,"
"Old Heidelberg," "Trelawney," ... the innu-
merable native plays wherein the family of wealth
and position opposes its son's marriage to a poor
working girl or its daughter's marriage to a young
commoner ... all are intrinsically of the class
versus mass posture. The Lords and Ladies of
Tom Robertson and the Misters and Missuses of
Owen Davis (vide "Forever After," which played
an entire season in New York alone) are brothers
and sisters under their skins.

§ 43

The Protean Play. — That a four-act play of the
nature, for example, of "Under Orders," acted in
its entirety by a cast composed of but two players, is
interesting is not to be denied. But that the quality
of interest aroused is precisely akin to that aroused
by a man playing a banjo with his toes — and that,
incidentally, the quality of the resulting drama is
of a piece with the quality of the resulting music —
is to be denied no less. Such a play is to drama
very largely what the vaudeville mind-readers
named the Zanzigs are to Sigmund Freud. Just
as with the Zanzigs a member of the audience is

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pricked up vastly less by being told that what he
is holding in his hand is a plumber's license than by
guessing how the -Zanzigs did it, so with a play of
this kind is a member of the audience made curious
much less by the progress of the drama than by
speculating how two lone actors are going to fur-
ther the progress of that drama. That the play-
wright in such an instance writes a play for two ac-
tors less than he writes two actors for a play is,
of course, obvious. And while it is readily to be
allowed that he may maneuver his trick dexterously,
the fact remains that all that remains is this trick.
And a trick, alas, is no more profound drama than
pulling goldfish out of an ink-well is deep-sea fish-
ing.

§ 44

On Aesthetic Dancing. — The numerous schools
and cults of aesthetic dancing, interior and al
fresco, are doubtless grounded less on the honest
desire to make a beautiful art of the dance than on
the Freudian desire of unwanted vestals to play in-
directly, yet satisfactorily, with the masculine pas-
sions. A bevy of women running half naked
around Central Park is not nearly so intent upon
enthroning Terpsichore in her niche in the temple
of the beaux arts as upon watching the effect on the

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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM 151
park policeman out of the comers of its eyes. The
unloved woman with legs gnarled and knotted like
a rustic bench, galloping across the grass plots
in a sheet and a diaper, thus takes out her sinister
revenge. No women half-way admired by men,
and loved by men, go in for undressing in public,
whatever the artistic purport of their intentions,
save possibly upon the stage. The moment a
woman runs around Pelham in the daylight clad
only in a bed sheet, under the dubious impression
that she is Psyche in the Arcadian Wood, that mo-
ment is it certain that she has reached the conclu-
sion that her charms are unavailing against the for-
tress that is man. The schools and cults of aesthetic
dancing are filled with left-overs, wall-flowers.
These schools and cults are to art what the Japan-
ese punk stick is to an old maids' tea-room.

§ 45

W. Somerset Maugham. — It is one of the char-
acteristics of W. Somerset Maugham's so-called
epigrammatic comedies — so painstaking and ob-
vious are the author's plants and cues for bright
lines — that one knows in advance precisely what
his characters are going to say and that one then
finds that what one thought they were going to

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say is much brighter than what they really do say.
For example, when in his play, "Caroline," his
elderly and already somewhat skeptic lovers, dis-
cussing prosaically their forthcoming wedded life,
suddenly begin quarreling over their union, one
knows that what will follow will be the man's con-
ciliatory "There, there, dear Caroline; let us look
on our coming marriage merely as a disagreement
to agree." But what actually follows is the man's
"Let's not quarrel now, Caroline; we will have
plenty of time to quarrel after we're married" —
a line favourite of every team of gas-house comed-
ians in the small-time vaudevilles. And so it goes.
That there is a certain graceful quality to
Maugham's writing, that he writes a more engag-
ing English than the majority of quill-drivers
who contribute to the stage of our own country,
is a matter scarcely open to question. But that he
is a wit or a writer possessed of even a facile
cleverness is a thing of another colour. The Amer-
ican newspaper comparison of his play, "Caroline,"
with the comedies of Oscar Wilde is surely a some-
thing to jounce the humours. In all of the play,
from beginning to end, there isn't one-tenth the
wit of die American Tom Barry's "Upstart" which
was ridiculed out of court by the daily gazettes
after a few performances several years ago in the

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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM 153

Maxine Elliott Theatre, one twentieth the wit of the
American George Bronson Howard's "Snobs" which
suffered a like fate at the Hudson Theatre — or
one-fiftieth the wit of Mencken's recent brew of
speculations enclosed between the covers of "A
Little Book in C Major." If you are one to doubt,
compare Maugham's "Marriage doesn't change a
woman much. She remains just the same, only
more so," with Mencken's "The charm of a man is
measured by the charm of the women who think
that he is a scoundrel." Or Maugham's "Men
don't want to marry. It's not their nature. You
have to give them a little push or you'll never bring
them to it," with Mencken's "How little it takes to
make life perfect! A good sauce, a cocktail after
a hard day, a girl who kisses with her mouth half
open!" Or Maugham's "Women make such a dis-
tinction between the truth and the true truth" with
Mencken's "Since Shakespeare's day more than a
thousand different actors have played Hamlet. No
wonder he is crazy!" Or the former's "It is in
railway stations that a man shows his superiority
to a woman" with the latter's "The one unanswer-
able objection to Christianity is that the God it asks
us to worship, if the descriptions of its official
spokesmen are to be believed, is a vastly less vener-
able personage than Ludwig van Beethoven." Or

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the former's "Nothing is so pleasant as to think of
the sacrifices one will never have to make" with the
latter's "When a husband's story is believed, he
begins to suspect his wife."

But I prove here what is already perfectly known.
Maugham is merely a pretty juggler of pretty words
who blithesomely tosses them aloft and lets them
fall about him in indiscriminate, pretty little piles
that have plenty of cake-frosting but little meaning
and less humour.

§ 46

The Risque Britisher. — It is, generally, as diffi-
cult for an English playwright to be adroitly risque
as it is for a married woman. The Britisher who
essays to write an adroitly risque little play is most
often as light and devilish as a German dancing the
tango. With the exception of Pinero's "Wife
Without a Smile" I am unable to summon to mind
a single modishly naughty British play possessed
of that delicate touch so imperatively necessary to
such affairs. No sooner does the British author
affect a momentary mood of wickedness than he be-
comes nervously frantic immediately the moment
is over with to explain at great and serious length
that what went before was intrinsically impeccable
from any angle of morality from which his audi-

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CHARACTER ACTORS 155
ence may have elected to regard it. The moment
a bashful double entente peeks furtively around
the corner of the proscenium arch, out dashes the
playwright armed with swabbing instruments and
antitoxins. The evening, in 'brief, amounts to
three acts of apology interrupted at intervals by
pseudo-compromising situations of the sort that go
to make up the violent serials in the Ladies' Home
Journal.

§ 47

Vaudeville. — Vaudeville is a species of enter-
tainment derived from the dregs of drama and
musical comedy assembled in such wise that they
shall appeal to the dregs of drama and musical
comedy audiences.

§ 46

Two Celebrated American Character Actors.— -It
is claimed by many of my colleagues that George
Arliss is America's most expert character actor.
And indeed, by this time, he should -be. For he
has been acting that character for longer than I am
able to remember. True enough, now the character
has been named Zakkuri ("The Darling of the
Gods"), now the Devil, and now Disraeli (in the
plays so titled), now again Paganini and now still

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again Hamilton (in the plays so called), but what'
ever the designation, Mr. Arliss' interpretation of
the character is ever the same. The slit-eyed peer,
the nervous hands, the velvet tread, the Ralph Herz
delivery — they never vary. The difference be-
tween Mr. Arliss' Disraeli and Paganini, as the dif-
ference between his Zakkuri and his Devil, is
merely a matter of make-up. A pleasant actor the
man is; but a versatile actor, or an actor possessed
of very real skill, certainly not. Otis Skinner, like
Arliss, is also a one-part actor. His characteriza-
tions vary only in the tint of grease-paint with which
he colours his face. The difference between his
Anthony Bellchamber, English actor, and his An-
tonio Camaradonio, Italian organ-grinder, for ex-
ample, is but the difference between Hess* No. 9
(healthy pink) and a grayish wig and Hess* No. 12
(healthy olive) and a black wig. Otherwise, all
is as one: the flourish of gesture, the cocking of
the eye, the slap upon the expanded chest, the ele-
vation of the right shoulder, the hat upon one ear,
the running of the scale with the speaking voice,
the posture debonnaire, the backs of the palms sup-
porting the chin, and the smiling of the whimsical
smile. . . . Whatever the role, the same bag of
tricks. Mr. Skinner never gets deeper into the soul
of the character he is playing than that soul is re-

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JOURNALISTIC HAZLITTRY 157
vealcd to him in his dressing-room mirror. His
Italian organ-grinder is less an Italian organ-
grinder than an imitation of the late Maurice
Farkoa in a yellow sash.

§ 49

The Journalistic Hazlittry. — Not less interesting
than Dunsany's "The Laughter of the Cods" were
the journalistic critical performances visited upon
the work and its author on the occasion of the play's
initial revealment in the United States. By way of
assessing the kidney of criticism to which a play-
wright is subjected at the hands of New York jour-
nalism, let us undertake the completely bootless
business of criticizing one of the representative and
typical criticisms confected on this especial occa-
sion — the criticism in point being that of Mr. J.
Ranken Towse, of the Evening Post, the dean of
metropolitan journalistic play reviewers. An ex-
cerpt from this critical estimate will serve. Thus,
then, this Mr. Towse:

"A close, critical scrutiny of the play reveals some
obvious weaknesses. In the first place, it is certain that
when an argument or a meaning is intended the exposi-
tion of it should be clear. In this particular case, for
instance, in which, supernatural ism (whether Pagan or
otherwise is immaterial) supplies the energy of the whole

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dramatic scheme, the spectators ought to be left in no
doubt as to whether or not it is held up to ridicule.
Yet this is the condition in which a good many of them
must have found themselves the other evening if it oc-
curred to them to think at all. It is not probable that
Lord Dunsany deliberately set to work to puzzle his
audience with conundrums, but he has proposed several.
At whom or at what were the gods laughing? At the
jocose slaughter of a court which had refused to credit a
prophecy which they had themselves suborned or at
the priest whose lie they converted into a true and seem-
ingly inspired prediction? Or did the priest willingly
deceive his blackmailers by pretending that he was lying
when he knew that he was speaking the truth? Or was
he trying at the last to undo the mischief for which he
was mainly responsible?"

In the first place, the observation that "It is cer-
tain that when an argument or a meaning is in-
tended the exposition of it should be clear. In this
particular case, for instance, in which supernatural-
ism . . . supplies the energy of the whole dra-
matic scheme, the spectators ought to be left in no
doubt as to whether or not it is held up to ridicule,"
etc.

In the first place as to this in-the-first-place, why
should it be desirable that the spectators be left
in no doubt as to whether the supernaturalism in
point is or is not held up to ridicule? Even grant-

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JOURNALISTIC HAZLITTRY 159
ing that some sort of argument or meaning is in-
tended which — as Dunsany explicitly stated in an
article quoted in the Evening Post, among other
papers — is not the case. This leaving of the spec-
tators in doubt is the very element that makes the
play the notably impressive thing it is. Chester-
ton has worked the same trick in "Magic." Brieux
has done largely the same thing in "La Foi."
Ibsen, if we are to listen to the opinions of Catulle
Mendes, Ahlberg, Jaeger and Georg Brandes, did
much the same in his "Comedy of Love." The
spectators at Ibsen's "Wild Duck" are left in doubt
as to where the thematic ridicule of satire ceases
and the bite of tragedy begins, and vice versa.
And so on without end.

"It is not probable mat Dunsany deliberately
set to work to puzzle his audience with conun-
drums, but he has proposed several," continues the
reviewer, — and proceeds to enumerate.

Dunsany — despite the reviewer — deliberately Bet
to work to do just that. If intrinsic proof be
needed, we have his published word for it. But
to this outside word it is not necessary to look.
"The Laughter of the Cods," plainly enough, is
deliberately a conundrum play — as "The Lady or
the Tiger" was deliberately a conundrum story
and as "Mr. Lazarus" and the "The Thirteenth

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Chair" were deliberately conundrum plays. Or,
on a higher level, as Schnitzler's "Bernhardi" and
Bahr's "Principle" and Galsworthy's "Strife" are,
in one sense, deliberately conundrum plays and
as, in another, are Shaw's "Getting Married" and
— by stretching a point — Dunsany's own "Glitter-
ing Gate." The thematic conundrum of "The
Laughter of the Gods" puzzles Dunsany's audi-
ence for the very simple reason that it also puz-
zles Dunsany. And being an artist, Dunsany has
none of the hack's wish arbitrarily to answer what
is intrinsically an unanswerable riddle merely that
his play may be the more toothsome to the yokel
appetite for "endings." This childish desire to
have everything explained, proved, settled, sealed
and labelled is the invariable itch of the What's-
Inside-the-Doll school of journalistic criticism to
which this Mr. Towse is a typical doctor. Of the
inscrutable mysteries and riddles of the universe,
the meaninglessness in the circlings of the globe
and of what transpires on it and above it and be-
low it, this criticism and its devotees demand a
facile and satisfactory solution. That the great
artists of the world, from Shakespeare and Bee-
thoven to Hauptmann and Anatole France and
from Ibsen and Balzac to Synge and Gorky and
Conrad, have been baffled in the face of the rid-

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JOURNALISTIC HAZLITTRY 161
dies means less to the Towses than that the Charles
Kleins and Charles Rann Kennedys have always
been quick to find soothing answers.

The utter fatuity of such criticism is to he per-
ceived in the questions which the reviewer would
have Dunsany and his work answer and which,
being not answered, greatly, in the reviewer's esti-
mation, weaken the play.

"At whom or at what were the gods laughing?"
the curious Towse demands to know. Or again —

"Did the priest willingly deceive his black-
mailers by pretending that he was lying when he
knew that he was speaking the truth?" Or
again —

"Was he trying at the last to undo the mischief
for which he was mainly responsible?"

Following an analogous train of critical reason-
ing, the good Towse might readily find fault with
"The Master Builder" (as, sure enough, did Pro-
fessor Frank Wadleigh Chandler, of one of the
numerous jitney Oxfords of the Middle West) be-
cause Ibsen has failed clearly to answer for the
Professor such questions (I quote the genial Pro-
fessor, who calls them "enigmas") as:

1. "Is Hilda a woman, like Hedda, or is she a mere
'imaginative child?"

2. "Is Hilda the youthful aspiration of Solnese re-

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162 COMEDIANS ALL

turned to him in later life? If so, his death is a
triumph, not a tragedy!"
3. "Or, again, is Hilda, as his embodied aspiration, a
futile force? If so, the play is a tragedy!"

And, similarly and quite as relevantly, might
the good Towse find fault with Beethoven's Fifth
on the ground that it does not satisfactorily answer
for him such conundrums as why does a chicken
cross the road, how old is Ed Wynn, and how soon
will William Jennings Bryan die.

"The Laughter of the Gods," though consider-
ably inferior to "The Gods of the Mountain," is
a finely imaginative and compelling derisory satire.
It brings one to wonder, once again, why no one
has thus far looked to Dunsany for grand opera
material. What librettos his plays would make!

§ 50

True Sentiment and False. — Every once in so
often some play writer addresses himself to achieve
again the spirit and romance of Meyer-Forster's
"Old Heidelberg," and every once in so often the
tilter comes unhorsed from the tourney. The sen-
timent of "Old Heidelberg" was brewed out of an
understanding of life and out of an understand-
ing of literary composition sufficient to translate

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PERSONALITY 163

that understanding of life to the stage. It was
not, like its imitations, a thing brewed rather out
of a misunderstanding of life and out of an under-
standing of the showshop sufficient to translate that
misunderstanding of life to the stage. Sentiment
is not to be projected through the proscenium arch
by a mere set representing a flower garden, a dim-
ming of the border lights, and Ethelbert Nevin on
an off-stage violin.

§ 51

Personality and the Actor. — On the vexed sub-
ject of personality and actor, one of my colleagues
— a young man given to a profound admiration of
the cosmetic art — has written: "Our critics always
have been a little bewildered by personality.
When they come upon a personality as vivid as
Mrs. Fiske's or Maude Adams', or Mr. Mansfield's
— where it is recognizable as a common factor of
all the artist's performances — we are sure to have
some wearisome paragraphs of protest from those
who are wont to confuse the art of acting with the
art of disguise. It is a little as though a music
lover might regret that, while Caruso was pleasing
enough in his way, he always sang tenor." My
young friend's employment of the word "art" to
designate the craft of putty noses and false whisk-

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164 COMEDIANS ALL

ers should be a sufficient answer to his notion as
to the place of personality in the sun of the foot-
lights. Yet his contention is so nicely representa-
tive of the opinion of the professional layman that
one may be forgiven for plumbing it a little fur-
ther.

In the first place, let us set down that person-
ality is a matter of major importance to an actor:
that personality is nine points in the histrionic law.
To this, doubtless, every cool eye agrees. There-
fore, since personality is nine points in the his-
trionic law, it must follow that, in an appraisal of
the histrionic esthetik, art is but one point. Can
one picture, for example, Mrs. Fiske's "art" apart
from her physical tricks and peculiarities of per-
sonality? And if so, what is the bulk of the "art"
that remains? Lazaro's art remains art on the
phonograph record. Imagine Mansfield's "Cy-
rano" on the Victrola! Would it be Mansfield's
art or Edmond Rostand's that the machine repro-
duced? The notion that a bad actor reciting
Shakespeare is merely an actor, but that a good ac-
tor reciting Shakespeare is an artist, is akin to the
notion that Shakespeare in paper covers is a lesser
artist than Shakespeare in morocco. Take Brieux's
personality from "Les Hannetons" (there is none
of the man's generally accepted and recognized

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PERSONALITY 165

"personality" in the work), and a work of art still
remains. Take Maude Adams' personality from
her Peter Pan — and what is left but J. M. Barrie?
When H. G. Wells wrote "Tono-Bungay," he was
proclaimed, and properly, an artist. But if H. G.
Wells were to write "Tono-Bungay" every year,
without variety, without change, would it be jus-
tifiable every year to proclaim him an artist of in-
creasing rank? Or Rodin; if, every year, he re>
peated his "Hand of God"? Yet year on year our
so-called actor artists repeat themselves, without
variety, without change, without diversity — for all
the world as if they were dwelling still in those dis-
tant days when first the heated young journalists
of the epoch proclaimed mem artists. Mrs. Fiske's
"Erstwhile Susan" is Mrs. Fiske's "Mrs. Bump-
stead-Leigh," just as Mrs. Fiske's "Mrs. Bumpstead-
Leigh" is Mrs. Fiske's "High Road" and "Servir.'
Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" is not Ber-
nard Shaw's "Csesar and Cleopatra"; Brahms 1
piano-concerto in D minor is not Brahms' piano-
concerto in B flat major. In a word, the so-called
art of acting has become, in its final deduction,
most often but the sustained art of acting and re-
acting a single role: the revolving disc of the por-
trayal of a role that once captivated the crowd.
That is, a successful catering to the mob. Hence,

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166 COMEDIANS ALL

mere salesmanship. Hence — save in a few sig-
nal instances — something scarcely compatible with
authentic art.

As to my young friend's supplementary criti-
cism: "It is a little as though a music lover might
regret that, while Caruso was pleasing enough in
his way, he always sang tenor." The obvious re-
tort would seem to be, "It is a little as though a
music lover might regret that, while Caruso was
pleasing enough in his way, he always — while sing-
ing tenor — distracted one with periodic bizarre
movements of his ombligo."

Nothing, as agreed, is so important to an actor as
personality; yet nothing so instantly bounds his ca-
pacity and versatility. The actor with a marked
personality — and here even a very great actor like
Salvini is found no exception to the rule — is as a
Corot upon whose palette there is an unconsonant
carmine which is forever getting vexatiously into his
brushes. A dryness of voice in the limpid lines of
Romeo; a staccato utterance in the soft lips of a
Princesse Lointaine; an uncontrollable neck twist in
the tender passages of Hannele; an indelibly char-
acteristic semi-grunt in the great silences of Cyrano
— these are the defects of personality that tear fine
moments of the stage into a thousand tatters. To
be effective, acting must interpret not so much the

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PERSONALITY 167

playwright's work as the audience's silent criti-
cism of that work. The actor who is most success-
ful is he who thinks less with his own mind than
with the mind of the theatregoing mob. And
this is why the thoughtful lover of drama, the
person who elects to use his own mind, has re-
cently taken himself in such large numbers to die
printed play. He appreciates the fact that a com-
fortable chair under a reading lamp is the only
place for worthwhile drama. And if, in sooth, you
are one to disagree with this man's notion and seri-
ously contend that good plays should be acted in
the theatre — that the stage is the proper place for
them — tell me what you think would happen to
Hauptmann's great Silesian play if, in the tremen-
dous climax to the fifth act, the child actress play-
ing Mielchen were accidentally to drop her panties?
Or, again, what would befall the superb art of
Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" if you were to
see it played by a Romeo who chanced unhappily
to be seized with the hiccoughs?

§ 52

Double Entente. — A theatrical piece by such rep-
resentative American virtuosi of thin ice as Mr,
and Mrs. Frederic Hatton ever suggests a French

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168 COMEDIANS ALL

play written in Chicago. Invariably selecting
themes distinctly Gallic, the Hattons with equal reg-
ularity select treatments distinctly galline. That
this selection of treatment is, however, invol-
untary, that it proceeds automatically from the
collaborators' shortcomings, is apparent to any-
one who has passed an eye over their various
labours. Breathlessly pursuing the elusive double
entente and attempting a flying leap to the step
of its caboose, the Hattons are forever missing
and landing with a loud Dump upon their joint
sit-spot. But such is the patent unshakable de-
termination of the good souls and so great their
ardour to be the Chicago de Caillavet and de Flers,
that a rub on the sore place and they are forever
once again up and at it. Does a double entente
perch upon the window sill of their chamber and
chirp, and the Hattons are out of bed at a jump
and off to the pantry after the salt-shaker. Does a
double entente show its bead over the underbrush
and the Hattons dash wildly to the edge of the lake
and set sailing a decoy duck to lure it within range.
But nary a genuine double entente falls into their
clutches. For what they capture, when they cap-
ture anything, is less a double entente than a raw
smoking-car story, a mining-camp jape, a traveling
salesman's wheeze. And, further, not a ribald

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THE CAREER OF A CRITIC 169

plaisanterie swaggering unashamed in its ribaldry,
and so open to no charge of leer or hypocrisy, but
rather something that gives one the impression of
smut in a kimono, of dirt grinning at one from be-
hind a screen and crooking its finger. The double
entente of such Frenchmen as Cuitry fils and
Picard, such Italians as Bracco, such transplanted
Swedes as -Adolf Paul, such Germans as Thoma,
and such an American as Zoe Akins, is to be bred
not, as the Hattons believe, merely by crossing smut
with cftlogne, but by the infinitely more difficult
trick of crossing wit with literary skill. Double
entente is not, as the Hattons present it, an
obstetrician in a dress suit; it is a well-bred young
woman in negligee.

§ 53

/. M. Barrie. — The triumph of sugar over
diabetes.

§ 54

Episode in the Career of a Critic of the Drama.
— Two days before the opening of the new Selwyn
Theatre in West Forty-second Street, the manage-
ment by uniformed special messenger sent me, in
the stead of the reviewer's conventional paste-
board tickets of admission, a box from Tiffany's

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170 COMEDIANS ALL

wherein, amid a wealth of tissue paper, lay a hand-
some leather case (also from Tiffany's) wherein
in turn, amid more tissue paper, lay a magnificent
sterling silver plate (also from Tiffany's) engraved
with my name, a number of gorgeous scrolls and
circumbendiba, and the legend "Admit two."
Obviously, said I to myself, on gazing upon this
costly boon — obviously, said I, the MM. Selwyn are
about to open their new musee with an especial
piece de resistance, a true goody, a something
extra-fine. This must be, I said, since for such
things as Forbes-Robertson's "Hamlet" and
"Caesar and Cleopatra" the Shuberts had sent me
by the mere mails the ordinary stereotyped card-
board tickets, since for Bernhardt's "L'Aiglon" the
Frohman office had merely scribbled on a somewhat
dirty scrap of paper the figure 2, and since for
Dusc's "Hcimat" in Paris, I well recalled, the
manager had simply shouted to one of the ushers
to give me whatever decent seat he could find
vacant. In view of all this, repeated I to myself
as I gazed upon the MM. Selwyn's dazzling grant,
in view of all this, said I, the MM. Selwyn must
have something vintage, some impeccable bijou,
some great ruby, to set out before me. Here,
whispered I, would be no merely fine drama, but

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THE CAREER OF A CRITIC 171

something literally to floor and stun: a drama to
remember when other dramas had long gone, a
drama to thunder its echoes down the esplanade
of time.

So came the night of the event. Impressed and
not a little bouleverse by the handsome leather case
and my magnificent sterling silver ticket, I dressed
with unwonted and scrupulous care, essaying full
half a dozen ties until one suited punctiliously the
contour of my chin and a half dozen pairs of pumps
until the leather of one matched precisely the shade
of my trousers' braid. A bit of pomade upon my
hair, a boutonniere, a flip to the topper 1 — and the
glass satisfied me I was appropriate to the great
occasion. To Delmonico's then, the handsome
leather case and my magnificent sterling silver
ticket in my pocket, for a properly preparatory re-
past. A slice of Honey Dew, consomme Sultan,
a timbale a la Conde, red-snapper a la Venitienne,
a cotelette de Chevreuil, a sorbet, chapous truffes,
poires a la Richelieu, gateau Baba aux fruits — and
en passant a Taveme cocktail, a pint of Perier
Jouet, a bit of Johannisberger Blue Seal 1862 and
a few tablespoons of cognac to wash it down. A
Partagas Extremoso Delicioso, a victoria — the
handsome leather case and my magnificent sterling

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172 COMEDIANS ALL

silver ticket would deign to abide no mere taxi-
meter cab — and, heigho coclier, I was arrived at
the MM. Selwyn's propylon!

I was, I confess it, agog. The lobby flooded the
night with a thousand brilliant lights. The MM.
Selwyn, dressed to kill, stood beside an immense
horseshoe of pink roses and, beaming spacious
beams, addressed to me words of welcome. The
aged keeper of the door bowed meekly as I flashed
him with my handsome leather case and my
magnificent sterling silver ticket. The elegant
head usher, glimpsing my handsome leather case
and my magnificent sterling silver ticket, saluted
me a la militaire. The but slightly less elegant
assistant head usher followed suit and hastened to
signal one of the menial ushers to escort me to my
chair. Grandly was I led by this menial through
an Italian Renaissance promenoir unstintedly em-
bellished with gilt Byzantine griffins, silver As-
syrian hippogriffs, still lifes by Candido Vitali, the
flags of the Allies, a Greek urn or two, several Louis
XIV tapestries, a Roycroft library table, a number
of baskets of artificial poppies and goldenrod, and
four or five of Lewis and Conger's sociable brass
spittoons — and waved into the fauteuil desig-
nated on my magnificent sterling silver ticket.

I was breathless with the grandeur of it all.

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THE CAREER OF A CRITIC 173
And profoundly moved and expectant Haupt-
mann at the very least! mused I. And, even so,
this Hauptmann fellow would under the circum-
stances be at his best none too good. Or mayhap
Rostand! Yet this Rostand also would under the
circumstances be something of a disappointment
even at his 'best. The MM. Selwyn's plum was un-
questionably a more juicy one. I looked at the
handsome leather case and my magnificent sterling
silver ticket (allowed in my keeping as a souvenir
of the high event), and was certain.

The big orchestra boomed out "The Star
Spangled Banner" and, with the audience to its
feet, the national emblem was flung proudly in
dedication across the proscenium. . . . Andreyev
or von Hof mannsthal ! One or the other, I was
now sure. Nothing less! . . . The big orchestra,
the audience again seated, was at the overture, the
"Mireille" of Gounod. ... At least de Curel or
Bjornsterne Bjomson, I would have bet my shirt!
Or perchance some posthumously discovered MS.
of Strindberg. Or something of Schnitzler or
Tchekhov. Or even — though this was under the
circumstances unthinkable — a vulgar descent to
Gorki or Heijermans or Gabriele D'Annunzio.
. . . The orchestra became silent. ... A lung-
filled hush swept the auditorium. . . . The lights

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174 COMEDIANS ALL

became very, very slowly dim. . . . The luxurious

plush curtain rose.

"Don't she look just like a picture!" ecstatically
exclaimed a fat actress in a maid's costume, peer-
ing through some pink curtains at the left of the
Btage.

The pink curtains were then pulled apart and re-
vealed the leading woman in a pink nightgown
trimmed with dyed pussy languishing in a
pink bed and making winks at the friends out
front.

I seized my gorgeous program in seven colours
print upon vellum. And this is what I saw:

Jane Cowl

in

"Information, Please!"

by

Jane Cowl

§ 55

II addon Chambers. — In my perhaps sometimes
unjust critical canon, a dramatist is held always
to be as strong as his weakest banality. It is be-

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HADDON CHAMBERS 175

cause of this and because in the midst of even the
best of his good writing he descends now and then
to the most doggrel showhouse platitude, that I hold
Mr. Haddon Chambers in less than the common
esteem. If a man writes a distinctly first-rate play,
but somewhere — and however briefly — in that play
makes a small joke on Watt Street or Swiss cheese
or Yonkers, my prejudice, for all his otherwise
distinctly first-rate work, dispatches the fellow with-
out further ado. Thus, though in a play like "The
Saving Grace" Mr. Chambers exhibits a consider-
able measure of finished writing, polished humour
and occasionally dexterous characterization, the
resident impression I take away from the piece is
of the butler sneaking the usual two drinks of
sherry on the sly and, upon the sound of foot-
steps, gliding away from the decanter, the mean-
while whistling in innocent nonchalance.

Were minutes hours or even half-hours, Mr.
Chambers would be a precellent dramatist. In his
almost every piece of writing for the stage, he dis-
closes various minutes of sound worth. But these
separate minutes, save possibly in his "Tyranny of
Tears," are ever drowned in overwhelming waves
of inconsequent observation and the more or less
manifest theatrical dodges. There are several
such valuable minutes in his "Saving Grace."

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176 COMEDIANS ALL

But they, aa in his other plays, are surrounded and
riddled to the death by overtures in which two
typical Jerome K. Jerome servants set the table and
identify the characters presently due to appear, by
the bewhiskered whangdoodle of the faithful family
retainer who gulps and nobly declines to desert his
financially distressed employer, by the equally
bearded platitude of the last moment telegram
that turns the hero's fortunes, and similar dramatic
crutches.

§ 56

The Palais Royal Naturalized. — Were Brieux's
"Damaged Goods" to be adapted in terms of Ger-
man measles and George Moore's little Luachet
in terms of Little Red Riding Hood, the result
would not be more confounding than the invariable
local conceit of presenting the bed of Palais Royal
farce in terms of mistletoe. The notion, com-
monly suffered by the native writer for the theatre,
that an American audience will not stomach
adultery in light farce is absurdly ill-founded, as
the first adapter who sees through the current super-
stition will amply prove. The general practice of
adapting this adultery out of a play and convert-
ing it into a pinch on the arm, or something equally
lubricious, not only of course makes the theme of

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PALAIS ROYAL 177

the play perfectly ridiculous, but sorely damages
the box-office values to boot. When a loose fish
goes into a young woman's bed-chamber late at
night and without opposition remains in it until
early the next morning, there isn't an audience in
the whole of the United States that can be per-
suaded to believe for a single moment that all the
fellow did in there was to play post-office. And
while such an audience is willing — for the sake
of the tradition forced upon it against its will and
common sense — good-naturedly and temporarily
to overlook the preposterous equivocation around
half-past nine, it plainly begins to lose patience
when the equivocation is thereafter insisted upon
every other minute and when, in the midst of the
insistence, it suddenly develops that the young
woman who voluptuously held hands with the
Lothario is enceinte.

Ten years ago, the American audience may have
held, with commendable steadfastness of faith, that
adultery was confined to milk, but in the meantime
its suspicions may be said to have become some-
what aroused.

§ 57

Satire. — The seat of the trousers pursuing a
slapstick.

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178 COMEDIANS ALL

§ 58

The American Sentimentality. — A proof of the
incurable sentimentality of American theatregoers
is to be had in the case of Mr. Bert Williams.
Williams, seven or eight years ago, showed promise
as a comedian. But, each year since, he has re-
vealed himself as an increasingly inept and un-
imaginative performer. Yet each year he is pro-
claimed a better and better comedian, and ap-
plauded the more and more, merely because he
happens to be a negro.

§ 59

The Artificial Play. — To the composition of even
the most artificial of comedies, an intrinsic sense
of touch and go with life is patently essential.
Without this, the result is a play artificial not in
the intentional and appropriate sense, but artificial
in the sense of a street-light left unwittingly to
bum after dawn.

$ 60

The End of a Perfect Dane. — Every once in a
while the gentlemen who manufacture dramatic
criticism for the New York newspapers and maga-

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END OF A PERFECT DANE 179
zincs achieve a performance in the slapstick and
seltzer siphon so brilliant that it must fetch a tear
of envy to the entrepreneurs of burlesque, small-
time vaudeville and the pie film. In considerable
part the species of dramatic commentators who
believe that when Al Jolson falls with a thud upon
his pelvis the spectacle is vulgar, and that when
Falstaff falls with a thud upon his it is Art, these
gentlemen rarely allow a month to pass without
applying the bilbo to their own hinter-pant and
squirting themselves in the ear with the mechanical
carafe. By archaeologists of the bean feast, such
periodic critical rendezvous with the loaded stogie
are recognized as of a piece with the finest low
comedy of the actual stage, and as such are prop-
erly eulogized to their niches in the ante-chamber
of the temple of the beaux arts.

The late war doubled up the sheets on the local
Hazlittry with a persistent and sardonic waggery
and augmented at least fiftyfold the unwitting
metropolitan critical comedy. For the war
patently made the German, Austrian and Hun-
garian dramatist as popular in the Anglo-Saxon
theatre as a loud, wet sneeze and an indulgence in
left-handed stratagem was hence made necessary
when producers and adapters desired to present
the work of these enemy craftsmen in that theatre.

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180 COMEDIANS ALL

The result, as observed, was a critical wayzgoose
of truly magnificent proportions: a dazzling stand-
ing upon heads and tripping over mats and danc-
ing of the bump-polka the like of which even two
such proficient critical comedians as Mr. J. T.
Grain, of London, and Mr. J. Ranken Towse, of
the New York Evening Post, have with all their
virtuosity in unconscious monkeyshine been in the
past unable to equal in even an entire quarter
column of theatrical comment.

Among the most extravagant capers cut by the
local guerinets during this period of managerial
war-time subterfuge will be recalled the now cele-
brated instance of the unanimous acceptance of
"Such Is Life," a play produced in the Princess
Theatre and credited to the British playwright,
Harold Owen, as a typical example of modern
English comedy. This "Such Is Life," as will co-
incidentally be recalled, was actually a word-for-
word translation of "The Book of a Woman," a
well-known and typical modern German comedy by
the well-known Berlin playwright, Lothar Schmidt.
A tutti of not less imposing sweetness, as con-
noisseurs of the more refined cheese wheezes will
remember, was brought on with the presentation
of a play called "Grasshopper," in the Garrick
Theatre. This play was the work of von Keyser-

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END OF A PERFECT DANE 181
ling, the German, whose dramatic writings are com-
paratively as familiar to Munich audiences as are
those of George Broadhurst to New York. The
play was duly credited to von Keyscrling but, by
way of safeguarding the box-office against the
omnipresent and alert Mrs. Jays, the management
prudently dropped the von and gave out that Mr.
E. Keyserling, as they dubbed him, was a Russian
dramatist. This news the critical gentlemen of
the metropolitan brochures promptly swallowed,
with the result that the reviews of the play were
rich in profound comparisons of "The Moscow
Keyserling's" writing with that of such of his fel-
low Russian dramatists as Ostrovsky, Griboyedov,
Gogol and Turgenev and such of his fellow Rus-
sian poets as Tyntchev and Pushkin. In this enter-
prise, the Beaumarchais of The Times (the young
Professor Dr. Woollcott) was especially informa-
tive and, if I remember rightly, devoted consid-
erable extra space in his Sunday edition to an il-
luminating feuilleton in which he commented ex-
tensively and instructively upon Keyserling's proud
place in modem Russian dramatic literature.

Another if possibly not so mouth-watering
delicacy was the concerted critical promulgation of
"The Blue Pearl" as a typical specimen of the
American crook melodrama, the play — credited on

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182 COMEDIANS ALL

the playbill to Miss Anne Crawfdrd Flexner — be-
ing actually a translation of Arnim Friedmann's
and Paul Frank's Viennese sex triangle comedy,
"The Blue Crocodile." And still another — al-
though the war had no share in this drollery —
was the extravagant praise of the actor, H. B.
Warner, for his "fine art in holding the stage dur-
ing a fifteen minute soliloquy" in "Sleeping
Partners" (I quote the Globe Aristobulus by way
of sample), when the truth was that the actor's
art was so extraordinarily fine that Cuitry's
original soliloquy, with all its sly fancy and
humour, had to be cut exactly in half to meet the
Warner deficiency in talent for holding the stage.
The original soliloquy, incidentally, was read in
full in the London presentation of the play by a
performer even so lacking in fine art as Mr, Sey-
mour Hicks.

But with all this — and all this is as nothing be-
side the bible of critical foot-slippings and ker-
flops that in the early war years entertained the
archdeacons of joy — the real piece, the cake for the
birthday, the, plat filled with the maraschino, was
yet to come, since the last war year was to bring
with it the most truly beautiful flower of journal-
istic criticism, the most truly lovely bloom, that has
thus far blossomed out of the show pews of

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END OF A PERFECT DANE 183

Broadway. For in this year there was presented in
the Harris Theatre a play, and the play was called
"The Riddle : Woman," and here follows the
jocund tale.

This play was written about ten years ago
by Rudolf Jakobi, the well-known Hungarian
dramatist, and was produced under the same title
in the seasons directly following both in the Volks-
theater of Vienna and the Deutschestheater of
Berlin, The Messrs. Shubert, subsequently plan-
ning to exploit in this country a Danish actress
named Betty Nansen, purchased the American
rights to the Hungarian play and employed their
play-reader, Miss Charlotte Wells, to make a
translation of the play in collaboration with Miss
Dorothy Donnelly. These ladies took the Hun-
garian manuscript in hand and, by way of injecting
an atmosphere into it that might the better suit the
Danish actress, changed the locale from Austria-
Hungary to Copenhagen and such character names
as Julius Schebitz, Hermann Dunkel and Lena
Wegenstein to Lars Olrik, Erik Helsinger and Thora
Bertol. Meanwhile, however, the Messrs. Shubert
decided not to exploit the Danish actress and re-
linquished their rights to both the original Hun-
garian play and die translation. For several years
the play rested in the translators' desk drawer; and

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184 COMEDIANS ALL

then one day along came Bertha Kalich, the push-
cart Bernhardt, with her black eye peeled for a
Broadway vehicle. And out from its nest came the
dusty adaptation of Rudolf Jakobi's opus.

The Kalich blood-pressure jumped sixty points
when she read the adaptation, and she decided to
present it instanter. But care must be exercised!
the adapters warned her. For the war, as has been
said, made it a risky box-office-busting business to
put on a play from the pen of an enemy dramatist.
The Wagner-chuckers and Kreisler-grabbers and
Muck-rakers were ever snooping around in gum
boots! Well, why not throw them off the scent;
why not drop the suspiciously beery Rudolf and
substitute for it simply the initial C — C might be
taken to stand for something Copenhagenish like
Copnus; why not spell Jakobi as Jacobi; and why
not, finally, announce this C. Jacobi on the play-
bills as a Danish playwright and "The Riddle:
Woman" as a Danish drama? A rich idea; and
no sooner conceived than executed. And thus it
came about that Bertha Kalich opened one fine
night at the Harris Theatre in the celebrated Danish
play, "The Riddle: Woman," by the eminent Dane,
Mr. C. Jacobi.

Now for the criticisms of this famous Scandina-
vian work.

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END OF A PERFECT DANE 185

Thus, the learned Sir Isumbras to the World:
"The play's foreign manner is easy to detect. The
program's acknowledgment was hardly necessary
that Charlotte Wells and Dorothy Donnelly, who
made the present version, went as far afield as Den-
mark to find the original in a drama by C. Jacobi.
This Danish play is as danksome as the emanations
of the Scandinavian dramatists usually are."

Ah, Isumbras, the danksome Budapest of ten
years ago!

Thus, the Pupienus Maximus to the Globe:
"It is evident from the first of this Danish drama
that C. Jacobi knows well his Scandinavian temper-
ament."

So, the Eumolpus to the Sun: "The play is an
offshoot of the Scandinavian school of drama . . .
of the sort that Ibsen might have thrown off. The
Scandinavian characteristics are more than super-
ficial. The story is one of seething passions, of the
volcanic emotions of descendants of the Vik-
ings. . . ."

Thus, the Theodoras Gaza to the Evening World,
who — as will be noted — evidently read the play
in the original Danish: "Charlotte Wells and
Dorothy Donnelly have taken the Danish play of
C. Jacobi and made it an interesting sex drama.
It was all of that — and a bit more perhaps — in its

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186 COMEDIANS ALL

original form. There is no particular reason for
considering the work that Miss Wells and Miss
Donnelly have done. The main fact is that the
play suggests ... the thought of Ibsen. The first
act brings back Hedda Gabler and Mrs. Elvsted
. . .", etc.

So, the Giuseppi Fiorelli to the Herald, who was
apparently also privy to the original: "The
adapters acknowledge indebtedness for their idea
to the Danish play by C. Jacobi. It might be wiser
to acknowledge even more than the idea, since the
Danish names of the characters are retained . . .",
etc.

And thus, with firm finality, the profound M.
Towse, Titus Livius to the Evening Post: "The
simple fact is that in this case, as in a very large
proportion of the modern Scandinavian drama, the
main material . .> . ", etc.

Again, to turn to the periodicals, so the omnis-
cient M. Metcalfe, Ippolito Rosellini to Life:
"The Mesdames Wells and Donnelly seem to have
translated 'The Riddle: Woman' almost literally
from a Danish play by C. Jacobi."

And so, again, the ordinarily sagaeious M.
Lewisohn, Alonso de Ojeda to Town Topics: "As
Danish libertines are more picturesque than those
of other countries — with which we have been sur-

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END OF A PERFECT DANE 187
foiled — the adapters have not transplanted the
locale of the original play."

And so, still again, the pregnant M. Clayton
Hamilton, Rasmus Rask and Acusilaua to Vogue:
"The piece was adapted from the Danish of C.
Jacobi . . . and we should be duly thankful to his
two American adapters for drawing attention to his
prowess . . .", etc.

I need not go in for more. Without exception,
whether in the instance of newspaper or weekly or
monthly magazine, was the lay public fully en-
lightened by its critical savants on the "modern
school of Scandinavian drama of which The
Riddle: Woman* is a typical example and of
which C. Jacobi is a typical exponent." . . .

The incurable fancy, promiscuously held and
fostered by the local professors of criticism, that
the Danish drama is insistently and invariably a
sour drama, a drama of passion, abnormality and
low lights, should dally in passing with a number
of such familiar Danish plays as Gustav Wied's
"2 X 2 = 5," or "Thummelumsen," or Gustav
Esman's "Father and Son." For, contrary to be-
ing a typical specimen of the modern Scandinavian
problem drama, "The Riddle: Woman" is a typical
example of the modern Austro-Hungarian problem

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188 COMEDIANS ALL

drama. For one Austro-Hungarian like Schnitzler,
or Sil Vara or Molnar who writes with charming
sophistication in the twilight mood, there are two
dozen who annually grind out naive morning-after
yokel-yankers in the glowering mid-Pinero mood.
Mo twelvemonth passes in the Austro-Hungarian
theatre without its ample procession of "Riddle
Women," without its long series of reboiled Tan-
querays and Irises. In the half season directly
preceding the war, precisely twenty-eight such
ancient and artless boudoir explosions were set be-
fore the public in question. And for the full
season of 1913-14, the easily accessible Kiinast
and Knepler statistics reveal a doubled dose. . . .
It therefore grieves me sorely to report that Mr.
"C. Jacobi" is approximately as Danish as
Chauncey Olcott.

§ 61

Amour in the Theatre. — The basic difference be-
tween a comic opera libretto and a drama is gen-
erally this: In a libretto the interest of everybody
on the stage and of nobody in the audience is
centered on the successful culmination of the hero's
love affair. In drama the situation is the reverse.

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"LITERARY" PLAYWRIGHT 189

§ 62

The Broadway "Literary" Playwright. — The
technique of the Broadway "literary" playwright
consists (1) in expressing die simplest thought in
the most complex manner possible and (2) sup-
planting any monosyllabic word that may crop up
in the expression with a word at least four inches
long. Thus, if in one of his plays he desires a
character to observe that it is time for tea, the
Broadway "literary" playwright goes about the en-
terprise something like this. He writes, first, the
simple line, "It is time for tea." Scrutinizing
the line closely, and detecting its baldness, he then
changes the line to read, "The hour for the serv-
ice of tea has arrived." This line he ponders,
deems a trifle too bourgeois, and presently converts
into "The appropriate period for the distribution
of tea has overtaken us." Nor is the line yet pre-
cisely to his Corinthian palate. And slowly it be-
comes "The meet moment of God's beautiful day
for the social custom of distributing tea has dawned
upon the conscience." So much for the first step
in the technique. It now but remains to take out
the little words and supplant them with as many
true beauties. And so, at length, the line that

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190 COMEDIANS ALL

the character speaks is not the merely plebeian
"It is time for tea" but the vastly more delicat and
impressive "The consentaneous conjuncture in the
Infinite and Eternal's tesselated nonce for the homi-
letical punctilio of dispensing the brew of the
Camellia theifera has dawned upon the acroama-
tism." The impression one consequently takes
away from such a play is of having been present
at a discourse by the debating team of the Tuskegee
Institute on the one side and Montague Glass* Henry
D. Feldman, Mr. Thorstein Veblen and a Baume
Analgesique circular on the other.

$ 63

Eugene Walter. — The technic of Mr. Eugene
Walter in the achievement of stage melodrama
would appear to be as follows: first, to take a
story inBtrinsically devoid of melodrama; second,
to write that story on the smallest possible num-
ber of Western Union Telegraph blanks; third, to
throw away half the blanks; and, fourth, by way
of making the remaining blanks then pass for tense
melodrama, to cause what is written on them to
be recited by a company of actors in a rapid, ner-
vous and confused whisper. Mr. Walter's method
may be concretely impressed upon the reader by

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EUGENE WALTER 191

asking him to think of some such jingle as, for in*

stance,

Mary had a little lamb
Its fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.

Here, the reader will grant, may be inherent many
things, but assuredly no great amount of melo-
drama. Now, however, for Mr. Walter's secret.
First, imagine a darkened stage. Then,

Detective X
(Quickly flashing a pocket-light around the dark room,
taking three rapid strides toward the door at left centre,
and speaking in a rapid, quivering undertone) :
Maryhadalittlelamb.
Detective Y
(Stepping quietly to Detective's X's side, placing a
restraining hand upon his wrist, and speaking in a
breathless whisper) :

Itsfleece waswhiteas snow.
Detective X
{Glancing quickly to the right and extinguishing the
pocket-flash. In a voice shaking with suppressed excite-
ment and scarcely audible) :

And every whersjhatmary went.
Detective Y
(Handing Detective X his revolver. In a tense
vibrating pianissimo):

The lamb was suretogo !

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192 COMEDIANS ALL

— and you have the Walter system. A pocket-
flash, a revolver, a dark stage, and the most inno-
cent lines spoken as if the actors had lost their
voices and were victims of palpitation of the heart
— and you have the necessary air of mystery, fore-
boding and suspense.

§ 64

The Weil-Mannered Play. — All that seems neces-
sary to persuade the average play-reviewer that a
play and production are well-mannered is for the
producer to direct that the play be enacted in a very
slow and deliberate tempo, that the actors speak
softly, and that the chairs on the stage be uphol-
stered in some colour other than red or green.

§ 65

On Beauty. — My favourite and oft-repeated con-
tention that one good-looking girl is sufficient to
make almost any kind of music show thoroughly
enjoyable, is once again eloquently proved in the
case of such an Anglo-* xon production as "Over
the Top," and at the same time even more elo-
quently disproved in the case of such a Latin pro-
duction as "A Night in Spain." In the first direct

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ON BEAUTY 193

instance, what is otherwise an entertainment of
modest pressure is given a tripled fillip through
the presence on the stage of the arch tit-bit known
as Justine Johnstone, and in the second indirect in-
stance, what is otherwise an entertainment of su-
perior pressure is deleted of not the slightest fillip
by the presence on the stage of a company of ladies
even the most beautiful of whom fails signally in
ambrosial approach to a cow.

The Spanish type of beauty, of which these latter
ladies are somewhat remotely representative, is,
for all the democratic affectation of the Anglo-
Saxon Lothario, as much below the American type
of beauty as the American is below the Japanese.
Beauty, after all, in its general world sense, is de-
terminable very largely in accordance with its de-
gree of delicacy, as Nietzsche and numerous others
have pointed out. The Spanish beauty is the
beauty of the ripe tomato; the American, the beauty
of a slice of tomato on a lettuce leaf; the Japanese,
the utsukushiki of the lettuce leaf. To the true
connoisseur, whether Spanish or American, the
Spanish bloom has about it something too much
of the quality of the tube-rose, of a parade with
the brass bands too close together, of a Hofbrau
carte du jour: it is, in a word, too excessive, too
luxuriant. And when, as in the case of the "Night

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194 COMEDIANS ALL

in Spain" ladies, the exhibited beauty is as far re-
moved from the flower of Spanish beauty as is the
beauty exhibited in the Avenue des Acacias from
the flower of French beauty, the nature of the
aesthetic sensation imparted may be imagined.
But, as I have in the beginning suggested, it is
this very lack of beauty in these seiioritas that pre-
sents us with our embarrassing paradox. Where
the merely half-way homeliness so common to the
New York stage chills — or, at best, leaves one in-
different — the very amazing homeliness of these
ladies, by virtue of its sheer magnitude and unaf-
fected splendour, enchants completely. Where the
average moderately personable Broadway music
show creatures fail to divert the eye a second time
after the first chorus, these gorgeously unlovely
things attract and hold immobile mat same eye as
absolutely as — and in the same way as — Cyrano
de Bergerac and the Elsie de Wolf scenery, Cour-
bet's "Les Baigneuses" and green stockings, the
Fifth Avenue residence of Senator Clark and Jo-
jo the Dog-Faced Boy, a Boston bull and the nudes
of Paul Cezanne, or Madame Polaire and Youngs-
town, Ohio. Miss Johnstone is to the Senorita
Marco, true enough, as Aquavit is to beer; but, as
any more civilized Scandinavian will assure you,
there are paradoxes in tipples no less than in ass-

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TOUJOURS PERDRIX 195
thetics, and the two, though you believe it or not,
may yet be mixed to the charm of the palate and
the complete satisfaction of the judge of fine arts.

§ 66

Toujour* Perdrix. — One of the legitimate objec-
tions to the dramatic critic is that he always thinks
in terms of the theatre. When an undertaker falls
in love with a woman, he does not visualize his
beloved as a corpse. When a chemist falls in love,
he doesn't appraise his fair one in terms of so much
hydrogen, chlorine and Johann Hoff's Malt Extract
— or whatever is the combination that goes to make
up human life. But the dramatic critic is always
odiously saturated with the things of his trade.
The critic being, obviously, at least one hundred
times more a theatregoer than the man to whom
theatregoing is not a trade but a diversion, is at
least one hundred times more thoroughly imbued
with the things of the theatre. Visiting a great
man-o'-war on a gala day, he is impressed not so
much with the thing itself as with the notion that
it looks like the second act of "Pinafore." . . .
Wall Street is not Wall Street to him: it is merely
the big scene in "The Pit." . . . The voluminous
and exotic bill-of-fare in a German restaurant

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196 COMEDIANS ALL

looks to him exactly like the cast of "Ben Hur."
. . . How then does the dramatic critic justify
his existence? He believes that there is room for
experienced opinion on the drama and that the
best man to voice such opinion is himself — the man
who gets free seats — since it is impossible to ex-
pect any opinion worth hearing from anyone so
imbecile as to pay two dollars and a half to get
into the average American theatre.

§ 67

The Chewing Gum Drama. — In the program of
each New York theatre there has been appearing for
years a conspicuous advertisement of the Adams
Chewing Cum Company which in heroic type so in-
forms the audience: "All those who have to make
good and understand that no excuse goes, chew
gum. It is the one ideal habit of the alert!"

Since the Adams Chewing Gum Company is un-
questionably an astute concern and one that
shrewdly sees to it that its advertising is placed
where it will most impress and convince, there fol-
lows the syllogism (1) that the Adams Chewing
Gum Company must have a pretty good idea as to
the precise quality of the New York theatre audi-
ence, (2) that whereas one has heard not so much

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CHEWING GUM DRAMA 197

as a suspicion of facetious comment on the adver-
tisement from a member of a New York theatre
audience, the meat of the advertisement must be
concurred in by that audience or, at least, not
found bizarre, and (3) that, therefore, the New
York theatre audience which the dramatist and pro-
ducer must please is made up of a group of per-
sons who believe that Dr. Beeman is a greater man
than Beethoven.

With a few distinguished exceptions, the drama
divulged in New York year by year hence con-
tinues to be of the chewing gum brand. For one
presentation like the sprightly "Le Roi" of de Cail-
lavet, de Flers and Arene, there is ever the usual
plenitude of dramatic opera of the kidney of
"Broken Threads," in which the hero, cross-ex-
amined by the heroine, admits that there is another
woman whom he has loved and will never forget,
only to confess finally, after an appropriate
amount of quivery dialogue on the E string, that
he has been referring to his mother. And for one
representation of Pinero's genuine comedy romance
"Quex," ever a full measure of bogus romances
after the fashion of "The Pipes of Pan," in which
die Stars, the Moon, the Boul' Mich*, the Call of
Spring and the rest of the hackneyed blubber
troupe are trotted out on their alpenstocks and

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198 COMEDIANS ALL

wheel-chairs to make calves* eyes at the Philistine
tear duct.

§ 68

/. Hartley Manners. — Hie philosophy of J.
Hartley Manners, as typically revealed in such of
his plays as for example, "The Harp of Life,"
has all the efficiency of a bloodhound with a cold.
Seizing in this instance upon the theme maneu-
vered by Wedekind in "The Awakening of Spring,"
by Cosmo Hamilton in "The Blindness of Virtue,"
by Ludwig Thoma, satirically, in "Lottie's Birth-
day," and by writers on end fore and aft, Mr.
Manners contrives by a masterly application of
cerebral infelicities to make of that theme a thing
of serio-comic fluff. Mr. Manners believes that a
young boy's curiosity in matters of sex may best
be stifled by telling him plainly about such mat-
ters, a theory somewhat akin to a belief that die
best way in which to keep a young boy from de-
siring to taste champagne is to open a bottle in his
presence. Mr. Manners is respectfully referred
to Havelock Ellis. Mr. Manners should know that
temptation and warning are twin sisters. To this,
the admonitory "wet paint" placard and the pro-
voking impulse to touch a finger to the paint to
see if it actually is wet offer some testimony.

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J. HARTLEY MANNERS 199

So, too, by way of testimony we have keep-off-
the-grass signs, prohibition and married women.
Mr. Manners also believes that a boy's mother, for
the prosperity of his future manhood, should be
his sole playmate (the Oberon complex), and that
the way in which best to make him respect and be
faithful to one woman is to be told suddenly that
another woman whom he has respected and fallen
in love with has been faithful to some half dozen
men. Mr. Manners is, in fine, the sort of dramatist
who pours the sugar on the coffee instead of the
coffee on the sugar.

§ 69

The Comic Motion Picture. — The popular Mr.
Charles Chaplin's latest motion pictures provide
a still further testimonial to the versatility of the
fellow as a low comedian. A touch of Chaplin
now and again is a serviceable diversion against
the laboured unfunniness of the posturing artists
of Broadway. He is, however, to be taken in
small doses, like a few leaves of an artichoke
or a sip of Vieille Cure. Too much of him dulls
the palate, impairs the taste. And yet, for all the
splendour of the fellow's estate in this fair re-
public, it is but true that not only is he not nearly
so good a comedian as his brother, Mr. Sidney

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200 COMEDIANS ALL

Chaplin (whose "The Plumber" is by all odds the
most adroitly conceived and cleverly executed mo-
tion picture thus far revealed to the public — I
offer here less my personal and very largely un-
substantial opinion of such things than a consensus
of more authentic judgments) but more, not nearly
so genuinely happy a pantaloon as several un-
identified and tough-bottomed fellows who cavort
through the so-called Keystone screen comedies di-
rected by a Mr. Mack Sennett. This Sennett is
probably the most fecund inventor and merchant
of the slapstick masque the civilized world has
yet seen. A spectator of but very few of his pic-
tures, I am yet fascinated by the resourceful
imagination of the fellow. An erstwhile chorus
man in the Casino music shows, Sennett has done
the work he set out to do with a skill so complete,
with a fertility so copious, that he has graduated
himself as the foremost bachelor of custard-pie
arts, the foremost conductor of the bladder. He
is, in short, the very best entrepreneur of low
comedy the amusement world has known. He has
made probably twice as many millions laugh as
have all of Shakespeare's clowns and all the music
show comedians on earth rolled together. And
laughter knows no caste, no altitude of brow. I
do not know whether this Sennett imagines all his

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COMIC MOTION PICTURE 201

scenarios. But whether he imagines them all or
only a few, whether a portion of the credit goes
to his writing staff or not, Sennett himself is with-
out doubt the inspirational spring. There is more
loud laughter in his picture showing the fire-hose-
flooded house with the bathtub containing a flapper
working loose from its moorings and starting on
a mad career down the stairs, out the door and
down the turbulent gutters to the Pacific Ocean,
and with the populace in avid pursuit, than there is
in a hundred farces by Brandon Thomases. And
mere is as large an intestinal glee in his picture
showing the wind-storm blowing the nocturnal
pedestrian into a strange house and into a strange
bed already occupied by the person of a sweet one
as there was in a single serious drama by the late
Steele Mackaye. These Sennett things, too, must
of course be used sparingly. One can no more
endure them often — every week, say — than one
could endure every week a new book of Ade's
fables in slang or a new farce by Bernard Shaw.
It is the nature of such things — excellent as they
individually are — that their zest departs when ap-
proached too frequently. But a farce by Shaw or
a fable by Ade or a trouser sonata by Sennett is
each in itself a distinctive, albeit remotely related,
work of art.

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202 COMEDIANS ALL

$ 70

Art Via the Side-Street, — That the stage intro-
duction to America of the rare and imaginative
work of Dunsany would eventually have to be
vouchsafed by amateurs was, of course, to be ex-
pected. Just as it is a tradition on the part of our
professional managers that, in a military play, no
matter where a soldier is wounded he must always
wear a bandage around his forehead, so is it a
tradition of our theatre that either amateurs or
Arnold Daly must finally be entrusted with intro-
ducing to the American public all the really worth-
while dramatists. Thus, Shaw had to be given his
first American hearing up a side-street. So, too,
Echegaray (at Mrs. Osborn's Playhouse). So, too,
Strindberg. So, too, Bjornson. So, too, St. John
Ervine, and Bergstrom, and Tchekhov, and An-
dreyev, and all the rest

§71

The Censor. — How like a hair the line that sepa-
rates respect and ridicule! What if, at the height
of his moral crusading power, a waggish theatrical
manager could have got hold of a photograph of
Anthony Comstock taken at die age of two show-

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ON CRITICAL PREJUDICE 203

jng him — as was the genial mode in those days —
stark naked!

§ 72

On Critical Prejudice. — The dramatic critic who
is without prejudice is on the plane with the gen-
eral who does not believe in taking human life.
He is unfit for his job, out of place, a strayed buf-
foon. To he without prejudice is to be without
learning, without viewpoint, without philosophy,
without courage; in short, a menial neutral. The
ideal critic is he who venerates like a Turk, who
hates like a Corsican — and who knows no compro-
mise on middle ground. His estimate of art is
his estimate of Madeira: it is either good or bad.
There is neither such thing as fair art nor fair
Madeira. His business is not to encourage signs of
talent. His business is simply with talent or lack
of talent. He is not a school teacher: he is the
school teacher's husband. He is not a youth, open
to this change and to that, but a man whose mind
has walked the Louvres of the world and is just
a bit tired. He is not a judge: he is that which,
being the lingering bloom of judgments long since
withered, is harsher, more relentless than judge:
he is reverie and reminiscence.

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204 COMEDIANS ALL

$ 73

The Commercial Theatre. — As only a million-
aire, whatever the depth or quality of his artistic
appreciations, can buy the finest art treasures, so
can only a rich theatre buy the treasures of new
dramatic art and present them as they should be
presented. There is much nonsense written con-
trariwise by amiable souls who agreeably believe
that the best dramatists are glad to give away their
plays for nothing if only to serve the cause of art
and who believe, further, that these plays may be
presented with rare beauty in side-street little
theatres by amateurs who are occultly able to make
thirty-eight dollars' worth of cheese-cloth look like
three thousand dollars* worth of Gordon Craig.
The notion gained from reading breathless arti-
cles by visiting school-teachers to the effect that
the greatest art theatre in Russia — if not in the
world — was operated with the few dollars taken in
from the small audiences is a notion more pretty
than true. The greatest art theatre in Russia —
if not in the world — enjoyed from its very incep-
tion die fat and liberal sustaining purse of a
wealthy champion, without which it could never
have existed. Reinhardt and his fine enterprises in
Berlin were financed by wealthy social pushers.

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THE COMMERCIAL THEATRE 205
The Odeon of Antoine, and the National of Stock-
holm, and the Espanol of Madrid, were subven-
tioned theatres. And even our own Washington
Square Players, though it is not generally known,
were compelled to rely — for all their noble ef-
fort to make cheese-cloth look like satin — on the
hank-hook of a Wall Street banker. And though
these young impresarios did much excellent work,
the fact persists that when this banker withdrew
his life-giving purse in order to devote that purse
to the institution in America of Copeau's Theatre
du Vieux Colombier, the art theatre of the Wash-
ington Square Players had to throw in the towel
and close its doors.

The most grasping dramatists are generally not
(as is commonly supposed) the hack playwrights
of Broadway, the Strand and the Boulevards, but
the best — or at least the most famous — drama-
tists. Rostand, with the help of shrewd counsel-
lors, practised upon Charles Frohman's French
agent an auction sale of the American rights to
"Chantecler" so adroitly manipulated that Froh-
man was compelled to pay an exorbitant price for
those rights. Shaw's contract, which he has written
himself and caused to be printed at his own ex-
pense, is three feet long and, in addition to de-
manding a flat fifteen per cent of the gross re-

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206 COMEDIANS ALL

ceipts (the customary percentage is five, seven and
one-half, and ten per cent on the first five thousand,
seven thousand five hundred, and ten thousand dol-
lars respectively) clairvoyantly demands a share
of all tickets sold to hotel agencies and speculators
at an advance over the box-office price. To obtain
the plays of such dramatists as these takes not mere
"art talk," as the Rialto phrase has it, but cold
hard cash — and a great deal of it. And to obtain
even the good theatre plays of such considerably
lesser playwrights as Sacha Guitry, it is necessary
to put up a substantial bonus of from five to ten
thousand dollars. The American rights to Knob-
lauch's "Kismet" had to be bought from Oscar
Asche, its English producer, with an advance pay-
ment of many thousands of dollars; and for the
American rights to the spectacle "Chu Chin Chow"
the local impresario was compelled to lay out to
the same British producer an advance of so much
as fifty thousand dollars.

A theatre may have Shakespeare and Moliere
for the asking, but it cannot have the best in
modern drama unless its purse is well lined. A
poor theatre, further, though it may have Shake-
speare and Moliere for the mere .taking, cannot
present Shakespeare and Moliere beautifully, sat-
isfactorily, however much one may pretend,

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EDWARD SHELDON 207

for the brave poor theatre's sake, that it can.
§ 74

Edward Sheldon. — Were Edward Sheldon com-
missioned to touch up, for example, Ibsen's
"Ghosts" for the contemporary stage, it is an
eminently safe wager that he would go about the
enterprise something like this:

OSWALD

{Sits in the arm-chair without moving. Suddenly, as
in the distance a street-organ is heard playing "0
Parig?' from "Traviata.")

Mother, give me the sun.

MRS. ALVING

(By the table, starts and looks at him.)
What do you say?

OSWALD

(Repeats, in a dull, toneless voice as the street-organ
dies away and there is heard, from a neighbouring house,
the voice of a young girl humming Johann Strauss'
"Blue Danube" waltz.)

The sun. The sun.

MRS. ALVING

(Goes to him.)

Oswald, what is the matter with you?

OSWALD

[His muscles relax; his face becomes expressionless;
his eyes take on a glassy stare. . . . In the next room

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208 COMEDIANS ALL

a phonograph begins to play "Sempre Amur" from
"Faust")

The sun—

MKS. ALVING

{Quivering with terror.)

What is this? (Shrieks) Oswald! What is the
matter with you? (Falls on her knees beside him and
shakes him) Oswald! Oswald! Look at me! Don't
you know me?

OSWALD

(Tonelessly as before. The phonograph slops.
There is a pause. In the distance is heard faintly a
church choir singing Rheinberger's Requiem for Soldiers
of the Franco-Prussian War.)

The sun — the sun!

MRS. ALVING

(Springs up in despair, entwines her hands in her hair
and shrieks.)

I cannot bear it! (Whispers, as though petrified.) I
cannot bear it! Never! (Suddenly) Where has he
got them? {Fumbles hastily in his breast) Here!
(Shrinks back a few steps and screams.) No, no, no!
Yes! No, no!

(She stands a few steps away from him with her hands
twisted in her haw and stares at him in speechless
horror. As she stands so, there is heard approaching
in the street below a party of merrymakers with a band
playing Parry's "The Prodigal Son.")
OSWALD

(Motionless as before)

The sun — the sun!

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MIXED IDENTITY 209

(The band gradually dies out in the distance. There
is a long pause. From some place far away come the
strains of TschaikowskCs "Pathetique" as the curtain
slowly falls.)

Mr. Sheldon's inordinate affection for piccolos, fife
and drum corps, hautboys, love-birds, harps, choirs,
music-boxes, military bands, street and church or-
gans and Victrolas in the wings is instanced anew
in his every play. "Music off" is to the Sheldon
faith what clothes off is to the Ziegfeld. As a
result his plays and his revisions of plays generally
give one the impression that the theatre in which
they happen to be presented is situated always
next door to Aeolian Hall.

Mixed Identity. — When plays having mixed iden-
tity as their theme fail, they fail not because
the audience is unwilling to grant that a man
might conceivably be unable to distinguish his
wife from her delectable twin sister, but because
it is unwilling to grant that the man would con-
ceivably try.

§ 76

Unfrocking the Pretender. — In view of the in-
creasing prevalence of the lazy and detrimental

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custom of so many of our lady players to per-
mit expensive and magnificent toilettes to substi-
tute for talent and hard work, I have a sugges-
tion to offer our more sincere and serious pro-
ducers, a suggestion which — will they carry it out
— cannot, I believe, fail in time to improve to a
very considerable degree the quality of acting
in the native theatre.

My suggestion: Make the ladies rehearse their
roles in the altogether.

§77

The Professor. — One of the cardinal rules
preached and insisted upon by the doctors of play-
writing is that no play can possibly succeed and
prosper if its ending is not precisely that ending
— whether "happy" or "unhappy" — for which the
audience has been made to hope. "Peter Pan,"
with its audience invariably disappointed in the
hope that Peter may remain forever with the
youngsters the audience has been drawn to love,
was the late Charles Frohman's most lucrative
property, has made a fortune for Maude Adams
and Barrie, has brought a thousand dollars a week
for the St. Louis, Missouri, stock rights, and
has thus far been vainly sought from Barrie by

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LAUGHTER AND THE ONION 211
eager moving picture impresarios on a bid of
$200,000.

§ 78

Laughter and the Onion. — Why should the men-
tion of an onion infallibly provoke laughter in a
popular theatre audience? Because the onion has
a grave bouquet? Hardly, since the jimson-weed
(Diplotaxis muralis), which has a far graver, pro-
vokes not the slightest laughter. Because the onion
makes tears come to the eye? Impossible, since
smelling salts, which distil tears twofold, brew
not even a faint snicker. Because the onion, when
eaten, imparts to die breath a flooring sachet?
No, since Torreya nurifera food-oil, which imparts
even more mortal zephyrs, extracts nary a weak
chuckle. Because onion is a word of comic
sound? Scarcely, since union, which makes no
one laugh, is a word of equally comic sound.
Well men, simply because an onion is an onion?
Again impossible, since a scallion, which is
equally an onion, doesn't elicit so much as a gig-
gle.

§ 79

The Broadway Curtain Speech. — While it is
quite true that the art of a playwright is not al*

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ways soundly to be measured by the sort of cur-
tain speech the playwright makes on the opening
night of his play, I yet know of no surer brief and
estimate of the art of such a Broadway Sardou
as Mr. Willard Mack than that automatically pro-
vided by the august gentleman himself in his con-
duct and oral manifestations on such high occa-
sions. I have heard Mr. Mack address the flock
on at least a half dozen proud evenings and on each
such memorable moment Mr. Mack has summed
up Mr. Mack and die Mack art very much more
pungently and illuminatingly than the most acute
of his critics.

The most recent indulgence in self -appraisal
on the part of this Mr. Mack occurred not long ago
after the curtain in the Forty-eighth Street Theatre
had come down on the third act of his newest art-
piece, a serio-comic war composition hight "The
Big Chance." The applause liberal, the master of
the asbestos was constrained to yank the curtain
up and down some nine times. On the first yank,
Mr. Mack — resplendent in the outfit of a brigadier-
general, for the Mack virtuosity extends to his-
trionism as well as to literature — was beheld bow-
ing with elaborate and cavalierly deference at
Miss Nash, the leading lady. On the second yank,
the modest Mack bent himself so far in at the

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THE CURTAIN SPEECH 213
diaphragm in his humble obeisance to Miss Nash
that he almost lost his balance. On the third
yank, Mr. Mack, growing elated over the enthusi-
asm of the stalls, gave Miss Nash a loud con-
gratulatory slap upon her decollete back. On
the fourth yank, Mr. Mack, his elation growing
visibly, imparted to the Nash back with his palm
still another whack that made a hollow reverber-
ating sound as if the lady were just getting out of
a bathtub. On the next hoist, Mr. Mack, now nigh
unable to contain himself over the tribute of the
art lovers out front, grabbed Miss Nash and im-
printed a loud smack upon her hand. Thrice
more was the curtain then lifted and thrice more
did die overjoyed Mack pay sonorous osculatory
homage to the Nash fingers, wrist and forearm.
And now, the curtain up again, the applause wax-
ing hotter and his innate modesty overcome by the
demonstration, Mr. Mack, with the reluctance of a
pop-gun, stepped to the footlights.

"Speech! Speech!" cried someone in the back
aisle, presumably under the impression that Mr.
Mack had stepped to the footlights to get a hair-
cut.

At the cry, it was plainly obvious that Mr. Mack
was taken completely aback. Surprise was written
clearly upon his every feature. Surprise and an

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overwhelming sense of flattery. Mr. Mack de-
murely dropped his eyes. That one should be
paid so great an encomium! But again the cry
resounded from the back aisle. Plainly enough,
whether he willed it or no, it was now necessary
for Mr. Mack, however consuming his disrelish,
to say a few words. A hush. ... A pause. . . .
Out in the lobby, a pin dropped. . . . And pres-
ently Mr. Mack spoke. As hitherto and always,
not in laudation of himself, but of another. This
time, of Mr. A. H. Woods who produced his opus,
the liberal and unshakably confident Mr. A. H.
Woods whose dogged financial plunging in the
matter of mis particular production — by many con-
demned to failure — Mr. Mack so greatly admired.
To this habit of dogged plunging, Mr. Mack
wished to pay tribute. He cleared bis throat for
the purpose. Then —

"I want to call your attention, ladies and gentle-
men, to A] Woods," spake he eloquently and feel-
ingly — "Al Woods whose dogmatic plundering has
made this play possible!"

And this is why I have observed that while it is
quite true that the art of a playwright is not al-
ways soundly to be measured by the sort of curtain
speech the playwright makes on the opening night
of his play, I yet know of no surer brief and esti-

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A SAMPLE MASTERPIECE 215
mate of the art of such a Broadway Sardou as Mr.
Willard Mack than that automatically provided
by Mr. Mack himself in his conduct and oral mani-
festations on such high occasions.

§ 80

The Realistic Drama. — If, as many of the so-
called constructive critics maintain, it is true mat
our realistic American drama is eminently success-
ful in holding the mirror up to nature, it must
follow as a logical corollary that nine-tenths of
the important events in our national life occur
in the libraries of private houses, and that, what-
ever their nature, they are never without their love
interest, comic relief, and display of the latest
styles in women's frocks.

§ 81

Account of a Sample Masterpiece Born of the
Great War. — It is called "Lilac Time." It was
written by the Mesdames Murfin and Cowl. It
is a thing of pretty actors in soldiers* suits, peri-
odic off-stage bass drum beats bursting in the air,
promiscuous fervent handshaking of the bowed-
head, I-understand-old-man species, leading man

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with cheeks tanned by the make-up weather who
swallows when he makes love and who at great
length in each act is eulogized as a hero for hav-
ing performed some feat of bravery in the wings
during the preceding act, leading lady in peasant
girl's dresses by Lady Duff-Gordon who digs into
the old trunk and sentimentally draws forth her
mother's wedding veil, the playing of national airs
as four stagehands make appropriate sounds be-
neath the window as of a regiment marching off
to battle, the usual I-knew-your-father-young-man
sympathetic old Major, and veteran of the Franco-
Prussian war now old and gray who gives an imi-
tation of Henry Irving playing "Waterloo" and
who, after suffering a sudden and complete phy-
ical collapse following an hysterical reminiscence
of valorous bygone days, sinks into a chair and
promptly crosses his legs. . . .

The scene of it is laid in Berlitz, France, and
the time is the war year 1918. Judging from the
numerous outbursts of song on the part of the sol-
diers, now in solo, now in barbershop quartet
grouped around a drinking table, it would seem
that the authors' conception of war is that it is
something like going to college. Described upon
the program as "a play of youth and springtime,"
like so many other "plays of. youth and spring-

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THE BELASCO TECHNIC 217
time," it presents us in the theatre with the spec-
tacle of a mere lad of forty-seven and his love
for a slip of a girl of thirty-six or so, their moist-
eyed animadversions on "the lilac time of youth"
in the old garden at purple gelatine-slide time,
the summoning of the lad to his country's service,
the necessary postponement of the wedding that
was to have been performed that very morning by
the village Cure and the lowering of the curtain
for a moment to indicate the impromptu passing of
the young lady's virginity, the wistful looking out
of the window for the lover's return with one hand
clasping the baby clothes upon which the young
lady has been sewing, the message that tells of
the lover's home-coming, the bromo-seltzer ingenue
jumpings up and down, the second message that
tells of the lover's fall in battle, the young lady's
tearful eyes and nose. . . .

§ 82

The Belasco Tecknic. — It is the general produc-
ing technic of David Belasco first to pick out as
poor a play as he can find and then assiduously to
devote his talents to distracting the audience's at-
tention from its mediocrity.

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§ 83

The Commercial Public. — How many, after all,
the pleasant and meritorious moments in our so-
called commercial theatre, moments that have been
permitted by a dense or careless public and an
equally dense or careless professional criticism to
pass comparatively unnoticed; or else have been
deliberately snickered out of court. Consider the
lonely, orphaned scene in Augustus Thomas' "The
Ranger," the scene between the two characters in
the beleaguered stockade and the recollection by
one of them of a similar situation in "The Girl
I Left Behind Me." Recall the final curtain of
Tom Barry's "Upstart," with the descending asbes-
tos abruptly cutting off the Sow of the young up-
lifter's passionate rhetoric. What, too, of the
Chopin motif through Molnar's "Where Ignor-
ance is Bliss" and the caretaker's tag, "They've all
gone to the moving pictures," in Lennox Robin-
son's "Patriots." Consider the bit in Gillette's
"Clarice" when the doomed man tears up the little
sketches over which the girl has so bravely and
painstakingly laboured. And the resigned smile
of the husband and father at the close of Harold
Chapin's little tragedy, "The Dumb and the Blind."
And the scene between the ageing. bachelor, still

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ON NOMENCLATURE 219

striving to be young, and the life-filled flapper
in the second act — I believe it's the second — of
Hubert Henry Davies' "A Single Man." And the
scene between the suffragette and the faun in
Knoblauch's play. And the "But we thought you
didn't believe in marriage" and the "Oh, but my
case is different" scene in Fulda's translated
"Our Wives." These are but the handful that
come to mind at the moment. And they occurred,
all of them, in commercial failures.

§ 84

On Nomenclature. — While it may be true that
a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
it is more or less certain that it wouldn't seem to
smell as sweet if it so happened that it was called
a rosenberg. And while the Constitution of the
United States theoretically maintains that any
American-born citizen may possibly become Presi-
dent, it is equally more or less certain that a man
with a name like Bruno Gintz or Ambrose Wiffel
would stand a very poor chance of seeing the in-
side of the White House. Even if, indeed, the
rival candidate were Josephus Daniels.

What's in a name? The question may be an-
swered very simply. Say you are a stranger in

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220 COMEDIANS ALL

the city, are seized upon a remote highway with
a sudden cramp, and desire to consult a physician
forthwith. A mile down the street, you come upon
a building in the front windows of which are
visible the shingles of three doctors. The first
shingle reads: "Dr. Ignatz Loos." The second
shingle reads: "Dr. Hugo Gula." The third
shingle reads: "Dr. John J. Smith." Which of
these three doctors would get the trade of your
cramp? Plainly enough, the last. Why, you will
have to answer for yourself. But, however you
answer, you come finally to the conclusion that the
fundamental impulse that propelled you and the
cramp into Dr. Smith's office was little else than
the comfortable sound of Dr. Smith's name.

For those persons who believe that names mean
absolutely nothing, let us make another experi-
ment. Take, for example, a very popular ro-
mantic play like the "Romance" of Edward Shel-
don. The principal characters in this play are
named, respectively, Thomas Armstrong, Cornelius
Van Tuyl and Margherita Cavallini. Keep the
manuscript intact, with not so much as a syllable
altered, but change the Thomas Armstrong into
Cholmondely Tootle, the Cornelius Van Tuyl into
Ralph Sprinz, and the Margherita Cavallini into
Filomena Piu. What success would the play have

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ON NOMENCLATURE 221
in the way of sentimental, romantic appeal?
Imagine the lore scenes!

Why do theatre audiences laugh at a cheese
named Corgonzola and not at the doubly puis-
sant cheese named Minister? For the same reason
that they laugh at a reference to Weehawken and
not at one to a neighbouring New Jersey village
like Rutherford, a village intrinsically every bit
as jocose as Weehawken. Why is Kalamazoo
funny and the just as funny Michigan town of
Marshall not funny? What makes people snicker
derisively at Oshkosh and on the other hand treat
with silent respect the nearby and equally comic
Wisconsin hamlet of Appleton? Doubtless the
same thing that caused Amelia Bingham to ap-
preciate that if she remained Millie Smilley, as
she was baptized, no one would ever accept her
as an actress capable of histrionic heights more
elevated than hitting a comic Irishman in the eye
with a New York Herald.

It is as ridiculous to believe that a name means
nothing to a man or woman as it would be to be-
lieve that a name means nothing to a dish of
food. What theatrical producer would engage for
the role of Romeo an actor, however talented, who
was known to the world as Julius Katzenjammer?
What restaurant patron would enjoy the dish half

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222 COMEDIANS ALL

as much if it weren't named mountain oysters?
Imagine giving three lusty cheers for General
Claude Vivian Pershing! More feats for the imag-
ination. Imagine being impressed by a woman
with a fireside name like Carrie Dudley (alias
Mrs. Leslie Carter) in the role of Du Barry.
Think of being impressed by Irish impersona-
tions on the part of a girl named Blanche Min-
zesheimer (alias Belle Blanche). Imagine hav-
ing collected cigarette pictures of Pauline
Schmidgall (Pauline Hall). What if Jerome K.
Jerome spelled out his middle name — Klapka?
Why has Elsie Janis persistently denied with a
suspicious indignation that she was born Bier-
bauer? How many bottles of Mary Garden Per-
fume would they sell if they had named it, in-
stead, Schumann-Heink? What if the Oriental
Tbeda Bara had stuck to her real Cincinnati, Ohio,
name of Miss Goodman? Who would have
listened to Billy Sunday if his name had been Max
Blitz? Jacob Beer, even though he changed his
name to Giacomo Meyerbeer, remains fodder for
the vaudeville comics. What girl, however hand-
some the man and however opulent he was in the
goods of the world, would enthuse over marrying
him if he happened to enjoy such a name as Eli-
phalet Gilgal, or Joel Pecos, or Kosciusko Saus?

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ON NOMENCLATURE 223
Rex Beach and Jack London, signed to stories of
wild Alaska, are names more or less convincing.
But say there were a woman who could write
stories of wild Alaska very much better than these
twain — whose name happened to be Gladys Dar-
ling or Mae Sunshine. What serious considera-
tion would the poor girl get? Or say the maga-
zine writer named Bonnie Ginger, whose work ap-
pears regularly in the Street and Smith publica-
tions, bad chanced to write Andreas Latzko's
"Men in War" — who would have been disturbed
by it? What if the actress named Trixie Fri-
ganza had been in Edith Cavell's place, or the
motion-picture girls named Arline Pretty and
Louise Lovely in the places of the Congressional
Jeanette Rankin and the Suffragette Pankhurst!

The theory that a name means next to nothing,
and that it exercises little or no bearing upon the
fortunes of its owner, is a theory akin to that
which would stoutly maintain that a girl named
Minnie Ohio would be as likely to impress Co-
vent Garden as Marguerite, despite her equal
talents, as the one named Mignon Nevada. There
are exceptions, of course, but they prove little.
For one Leo Ditrichstein who has succeeded in en-
chanting the matinee girl despite the influenza of
his name, there have been several dozens who,

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224 COMEDIANS ALL

afraid to take so great a chance, have astutely
turned the natal Simon into Selwyn, Lepper into Ab-
ingdon, and something or other considerably less
harmonious into Courtenay. And for one Lud-
wig Rottenberg who has succeeded in the musical
world in spite of the patronymic odour, there have
been a score or more who, sensing the danger,
have changed themselves from Nachtigall into
Luscinius. What chance did poor Mr. 0. U.
Bean, who produced "An Aztec Romance" in
the Manhattan Opera House six or seven years
ago, stand? Even if he had revealed himself a
new Gordon Craig or Reinhardt? What serious,
attention, in turn, would Gordon Craig ever have
attracted had his name been O. U. Bean? Hash
called emince tastes twice as good. A firm call-
ing itself the Royal-Imperial Corset Company will
sell its wares to twice as many women as it would
were it to call itself by the names of its proprietors,
Bierheister and Pluto, Inc. And finally, what if
Rigo, the eye-rolling, lady-killing fiddler, had pos-
sessed the name Herman or Gus?

§ 85

Opera Comigue. — The formula of opera oo-
mique: Act I — "The Boar's Head Tavern" with

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OPERA COMIQUE 225

the fat-legged chorus of female villagers, the King's
Guard as stiff as ramrods, the hero with his shirt
open at the neck, the daughter of the poor inn-
keeper who hugs the footlights, closes her fists
upon her bosom and blinks her way through a
song called "Love is a Rose," the low comedian
with the funny legs, plug hat, red nose and joke
about matrimony-alimony; Act II — "The Court-
yard of the Palace" with the fat-legged villagers
now appearing as red-and-green gipsies, the
frowzy old stock company actress with a velvet
portiere attached to her bustle (thus depicting a
Queen), the Prince incognito, the separation of
the lovers by the cruel librettist, and the low come-
dian with the funny legs, plug hat, red nose and
joke about germs coming from Germany; Act III
— "The Throne Room of the Palace," with the
fat-legged first-act villagers and second-act gipsies
now wearing long white sateen skirts and walking
across the stage as if a loved one had just died
(thus vouchsafing the yokels a regal "coronation
scene"), the reunion of the lovers through the
news that the hero has been pardoned, and the
low comedian with the funny legs, plug hat, red
nose and joke about Pittsburgh. . . .

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§ 86

Dramatic Paradox. — Why is that theatrical
audiences always laugh at the blunders of the in-
nocently ignorant characters in drama and are
moved to compassion by the blunders of the in-
telligent? Is this not directly opposite to the
practice in actual life?

§ 87

The French and American Taste. — One has only
to compare such a play as Harry James Smith's
"The Little Teacher" with such a play as Alfred
Capus' "The Little Postmistress" to sense (1) the
difference between the tastes of an American and
a French playwright, and (2) the difference be-
tween the tastes of an American and a French
theatre audience. I doubt whether in the dramatic
literatures of the two nations there are two plays,
of whatever quality, that may more exactly il-
luminate the respective postures of these nations in
their playhouses. Both plays proceed from the
adventures of a spotless virgin come to earn a
livelihood in a small village and each play in its
subsequent progress pronounces clearly, and at
every rum, me stereotyped characteristics of the

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TASTE 227

audience for which it was designed. The Capus
play is a brightly written, sophisticated, good-
natured and droll comedy of live and living per-
sons. The Smith play is an amalgam of all the
mildewed hokums of the Broadway showsbop ex-
pounded through the figures of all the mildewed
puppets of the one-night-stand opera houses.
This Smith work, is, indeed, a veritable tour de
force in the so-called sure-fire devices that are
ever successful in the diteggiatwa of the keyboard
of the native playgoing yokel's emotions and the
pawing out of bis moods doloroso, infervorato,
vivace con furioso and /. quanta possibile, a tour
de force in the yap-traps and old reliables of stage
commerce that has not been matched for sheer
virtuosity since George M. Cohan's "Hit-the-Trail
Holliday."

The story of the play is the autobiography of
the brazen popularity stratagems of the American
folk stage. The picture of George Washington
decorated with American flags; the picture of
Woodrow Wilson beside it; drawings of the Star
Spangled Banner upon the blackboard by the
school children with coloured chalks; the creeping
down the stairs of a small tot in its little white
nightie; the sprig of Spring blossoms which the
heroine gives to the hero and which the hero

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228 COMEDIANS ALL

tenderly presses in a book for sweet memory's
sake; the drunken father who beats his children
until the "purple welts" show on their backs; the
twain of sour old maiden ladies who seek to stir
up the community against the little school teacher
because they believe her relations with the hero
are not so innocent as they seem; the uncouth but
whole-hearted lumber-jack to whom the little
school teacher teaches the A B C's and with whom
she falls in love; the head of the village school
board whose bandanna protrudes from the tails
of his coat; the heroine's wistful playing of the
organ in the candle-light with the children in their
nighties cuddling beside her — the organ that
hasn't been played, it's nigh on thirty years now,
sence the baby died . . . they are all here. And
with them, the village beau in the loud red vest
who wets his fingers and creases his trousers; the
hero who fells with a blow the knave who casts an
aspersion upon the little school teacher's fair name ;
the kettle of boiling water with the real steam com-
ing out of it; the joke about Jersey City; the dis-
covery that the ill-used children were kidnapped
from their cradles and are in reality the heirs of a
rich New York family; the comic old rube who
goes on talking forgetting that he has a lighted
match in his hand and bums his fingers; the hero

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TEMPERATURE 229

who says "damn" and then, when the heroine
raises her eyebrows, elaborately begs her pardon;
the pale little girl child who observes pathetically
that she "never had no muwer"; the longing to be
back again in "wonderful little old New York";
the final vision of the hero in khaki . . . and you
have, in small part, an idea of the night's in-
dubious traffic.

When one sees "The Little Teacher," one sees
synchronously the history of our American pop-
ular stage. It is a vaudeville of American
audiences since 1870 and, as such, the best unin-
tentional theatrical satire I have ever seen.

§ 88

Temperature and the Drama. — Of the numerous
delusions that enwrap the theatre, not the least
amusing is the hypothesis that the summer season
is suited vastly better to music shows than to
drama because the former, in warm uncomfortable
weather, place considerably less strain upon the
attention of the spectator than the latter. The
truth, of course, despite its regrettable air of
flippancy, is quite the opposite. A music show
like "The Follies," say, with its seventy or eighty
comely girls, with its every fifteen minute change

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230 COMEDIANS ALL

of multicoloured costume and brilliant scenery,
and with its quickly shifting panorama of dance,
tune and spectacle, invites the attention with a ten-
fold more close alertness than a drama like St.
John Ervine's "John Ferguson," for instance, with
its seven or eight characters, its very slow action,
its leisurely development of thesis.

The managerial assumption that the music
show provides the better form of hot weather en-
tertainment because it calls for a lesser sense-
organic agility on the part of the spectator than
does the dramatic show vouchsafes us a not in-
accurate measure of the peculiarly bogus
managerial metaphysic. Placing the cart before
the horse with his accustomed perspicacity, the
manager argues from the success of the music show
in hot weather — and from the reciprocal failure
of drama in the same weather — that the music
show is successful because it appeals to the
spectator's indolent hot weather mood, when the
fact is that the music show appeals to the spectator
in hot weather — as the drama does not — purely
and simply because in hot weather the average
man is of twice as active a disposition and of twice
as alert a nature as in cold weather, and because
the music show thus satisfies his doubly acute
senses. In the summer months the average man

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TEMPERATURE 231

who in the winter months hugs the radiator and
the easy chair is fond of exerting himself. The
activity he abjures in the cold season he adopts
with a furious suddenness and enthusiasm in the
warm season. Though he may be anything but
athletic, the warm weather sees him golfing, walk-
ing, swimming, bathing in the surf, playing tennis,
gardening, climbing hills and mountains, hurrying
to and from railroad stations, fishing, commuting
twice a day, working like a dog cooking his own
meals and washing dishes in some sort of "camp,"
going on long bucoiic hikes, spending weeks stalk-
ing the mythical bear in the Maine woods, rowing
his arms lame at Lake Mahopac, falling out of
canoes into the Hudson River or pitching hay for
diversion in Westchester County. The very men-
tion of such exotic didoes would make him grunt
a sour grunt during the winter; but, come summer
with its wilting heat, and he becomes abruptly and
surprisingly as active as a cootie. It is this
grotesque and wayward hot weather zeal that
brings him to the desire for a more lively form of
theatrical entertainment than slow-paced drama.
When the warm weather comes, his peculiarly
restless nature wants action, change, something to
rivet the attention, to provoke the emotions and
the senses, to hold the eye. And the music show

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serves this end. He strains his too long inert
body by day and, suddenly avid of life, he wishes
to balance the strain by a hard pull at his other
faculties by night And if he is not of the sort
that relishes the physical strain of sport, he
naturally relishes doubly, and wants doubly, the
equivalent and compensatory emotional strain pro-
vided by the theatre. Drama would rest him and
cause him to relax, and he doesn't want rest or
relaxation. He wants to have a smashing colour,
a dazzling parade, a ceaseless movement, litho-
graphed upon the combined blchromated gelatin
and albumen of his nervous and vigilant brain.
He wants, not an inert, passive and too easily as-
similated depiction of the tragic psychoneurologi-
cal phenomena underlying filial and maternal love
as set forth in some such drama as Hervieu's
"Passing of the Torch," but tbe active, absorbing
and every-moment intriguing and riveting kaleido-
scope of bewildering motion.

The problem is a simple one in practical psy-
chology, familiar to every Harvard sophomore.
It is fully explained by Wundt, Kulpe and James
in their respective writings on the nature and forms
of attention, and by Ribot ("Psychologie de FAt-
tention"), A. J. Hamlin in tbe American Journal
of Psychology, Floumoy ("L'Annee Psycholo-

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THE MARIONETTE 233

gique"), and the very sagacious Exner. . . . This,
therefore, the reason why "The Follies" is in-
evitably twenty times as prosperous a hot weather
show as would be the best drama Pinero ever wrote.

§ 89

The Marionette. — For the dramatist, the marion-
ette surpasses the living actor in the same way
that, for the composer, the violin surpasses the liv-
ing singer. For all the wood out of which the
marionette, like the violin, is fashioned, that wood
contains in each instance the potential voice of the
thousand and one inspirations of the creative
artist. Unlike flesh and blood and the whims and
idiosyncrasies and contumacies that go more or
less inevitably with flesh and blood, it serves the
creative artist with all the obedience and docility
of his pen, with all the expository force of the
lead that is in cold type. The critic of the marion-
ette is the critic who believes that the human voice
of Schumann Heink is capable of bringing as great
a glory to the "Heidenroslein" of Schubert as the
wooden voice of Antonio Stradivari, or that the
visible nose, Adam's apple and Chianti-bottle
figure of Mr. Robert B. Mantell constitute a
grander and more beautiful funnel for the majestic

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234 COMEDIANS ALL

verse of Shakespeare than the shrewdly negotiated

combination of a trained and mellifluous larynx

in the wings and a visible wooden figure finely

carved by the painstaking hand of an artist of

Bologna.

The "Scheherazade" of the Russian ballet, the
richest flower of pantomime and in its silence as
vibrantly dramatic as the most strepitantly voiced
drama, is in essence drama expounded by marion-
ettes. The "Voice in the Wilderness," the off-stage
voice of Cod, in the dramatic presentation of the
Biblical "Book of Job," contributes at once the
most effective and dramatic note of the play. Is,
then, the theory of the marionette drama — in-
trinsically a combination of these twain — so
absurd as some contend? . . . What living,
speaking actor could be half so effective, half so
revelatory, half so eloquent as Pinero's little
marionette that gayly dances down the curtain to
the second act of "A Wife Without a Smile"?
What living, speaking actress could conjure up for
the imagination the vision of a Jenny Mere as that
vision might be conjured up by a delicate waxen
doll responding to the golden, always-sixteen off-
stage voice of a shrivelled Bernhardt of sixty?

If there are certain plays that, in good truth,
cannot perhaps be so electrically played by ma-

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THE MARIONETTE 235

rionettes as by living actors — plays of sex emo-
tionalism, for instance — there are no less certain
plays that cannot be so electrically played by liv-
ing actors as by marionettes. The so-called drama
of ideas, for example, is essentially and properly
a marionette drama: the living actor not only
contributes nothing to it; he actually by his pres-
ence detracts from it. Lucien Cuitry as Pasteur
in the play of that name is less Pasteur than the
familiar Lucien Cuitry playing Chantecler in a
Prince Albert. It thus becomes necessary for the
proper effect of the play that the spectator, in .
Coleridge's phrase, strain to support the illusion
not by judging Guitry to be Pasteur, but by re-
mitting the judgment that Guitry is not Pasteur.
This "temporary half-faith supported by the
spectator's voluntary contribution," this mental
ruse and imaginative tug — this a marionette in the
role of Pasteur would not call for, since (I) the
role of Pasteur as written by the younger Cuitry
is primarily a mere spigot for the projection of
scientific ideas and contentions, since (2) a living
interpreter of the role, however able, by virtue of
his familiar and largely inalienable aspect and
comportment serves as a somewhat grotesque sieve,
and since (3), therefore, the marionette, being
obviously a marionette, would rid the spectator of

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236 COMEDIANS ALL

the devastating sieve consciousness and, interpos-
ing no alien physiological element and call for
temporary half-faith, would bring the spectator
without ado into direct contact with the aforesaid
scientific ideas and contentions. The difference,
somewhat less gaseously expressed, is the differ-
ence between watching August Fraemcke excite the
F minor concerto of Chopin on a Steinway and
listening to the ghost of Paderewski perform the
same composition on a Welte-Mignon.

Well, well, I probably exaggerate. Nor do I
pretend that I am myself yet convinced. But,
perusing the anti-marionette logic of the mummer
worshippers, my doubts and hesitations are some-
what moderated. If there is much to be said on
the one side, there is much also to be said on the
other.

§ 90

The National Humour. — Were I asked by a
foreigner to point out the most searchingly exact
and typical — if true enough not always the best —
specimens of the American national humour, I
should direct the inquisitor to the legend postcards
on sale for a penny apiece in corner cigar stores
throughout the country. Nowhere else, I con-
clude after considerable deliberation, is the unique

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 237

and characteristic humour of the United States bo
clearly presented, so clearly illustrated, so clearly
summarized. Search the libraries of America
from end to end and one will be at pains to find
a shrewder and better anthology than is revealed
upon these mailing-cards. I quote a few more or
less familiar examples, selected at random:

1. "What! You never kissed any girl before? Then
you beat it! You are not gonna practise on me."

2. "After talking with some people, without mentioning
any names, I wonder at the high price of ivory."

3. "Don't criticize the butter — yer may be old yerself
some day."

4. "I'm somewhat of a liar myself — but go on with
your story; I'm listening."

5. "I'm so unlucky mat if it was raining soup I'd be
right there with a fork."

6. "Some men will do more for a cheap eigar than they
will for a dollar."

7. "Don't spit. Remember the Johnstown Flood!"

8. "A tea-kettle sings when it's full of water. But who
the hell wants to be a tea-kettle?"

9. "Life is one damn thing after another. Love is two
damn things after each other."

10. "I've met both your gentlemen friends, and I don't
know which one I like the worst."

11. "Kiss me quick, kid; I'm going to eat onions."

12. "If you have nothing to do, don't do it here."

13. "Come in without knocking. Go out the same way."

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238 COMEDIANS ALL

14. "If you spit on the floor at home, spit on the floor
here. We want you to feel at home."

15. "Take things easy. You can always go to jail."

16. "Don't swear while here. Not that we care a damn,
but it sounds like hell to strangers."

17. "If every man was as true to his country as he is to
his wife, God save the U. S. A."

18. "You can't fool nature. That's why so many pro-
hibitionists have red noses."

19. "The peacock is a beautiful bird, but it takes the
stork to deliver the goods."

20. "Don't say mean things to your mother-in-law. . . .
Kick her in the slats."

21. "What! You here again? Another half hour gone
to hell!"

22. "Half the world is nutty — the rest are squirrels."

23. "I ain't got nothing to live for; nobody loves me but
the dog, and he's got fleas."

24. "A baby doesn't know much, but father can't wear
mother's nightgown and fool it when it's hungry."

25. "Calves may come and cows may go, but the bull
goes on forever." .

26. "I love my patent leather, but oh you undressed kid."

27. "I may be no chicken, but I'm game.**

28. "Any fool can go to bed, but getting up takes a
man!"

29. "Our eyes have met, our lips not yet, but oh you kid,
I'll get you yet"

30. "An Irishman dies every time they're short an angel
in Heaven."

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 239
Not a tony, an elegant, humour perhaps — but
nevertheless a humour sharply typical of the
present day American people: as typical in its way
as is the humour of he Rire, Maillol and Rip of
the French, the humour of Seymour Hicks, Tit-
Bits and the New Cross Empire of the British,
or the humour of Busch, the side-street Tingel-
Tangel and Georg Okonkowski of the German.
The national humour of America, like that of any
other nation save Spain and possibly France, is
in the main its lowest and mo3t vulgar humour.
Thus, the satirical humour of George Ade — the fin-
est American humour of our time — is no more
accurately the weather-cock of the American na-
tional chuckle than the high satirical humour of
Anatole France is the divining-rod of the French,
or the striking satirical humour of Ludwig Thoma
that of the German, or the smart satirical humour
of Max Beerbohm that of the British. The na-
tional humour is obviously enough the humour
not of the few, but of the mass — the plurality
humour. And thus the humour most typical of
the American people is the humour of the beer
saloon, the scenic railway pleasure park, the
country fair, the day coach smoking car, the
street-corner, the chowder club picnic, the political

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240 COMEDIANS ALL

rally, the baseball bleachers. The humour of any
nation is the humour of its leading bartender.
The humour of England is assuredly typified vastly
less by the reply of a W. S. Gilbert to the ques-
tion of what he thought of Dickens — "He was, if
you understand me, a gentish person" — than by
some such punning allusion of Arthur Wimperis
as General Haig and Haig or Admiral Jellycake.
The humour of Germany is not of the stuff of
Bismarck's reply when they asked him how he
would settle the Irish problem — "I would have the
Irish and the Dutch exchange countries: the Dutch
would make a garden of Ireland, and in a year or
so the Irish would begin neglecting the dikes" —
but of the stuff of some such music-hall "Jupplala"
lyric whence was derived the American "My wife's
gone to the country, hooray, hooray!" And the
national humour of France, though probably of a
suaver quality than that of the other nations here
considered, since France, after all, is metropolitan
Paris and metropolitan Paris France, is measur-
ably less the gorgeous humour of "The Revolt of
the Angels" than that of the well-known comic
boulevard picture with the appended inscription,
"Is this Monsieur Calchot that I have the pleasure
of addressing?"

In England and on the Continent, the character-

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 241
istic humour of a nation is the humour of its music-
halls. The humour of the Alhambra, the Victoria
Palace and the Camberwell Empire is as certain
a thermometer of the British humour as that of the
Folies-Bergere, the Olympia, the Bobino and the
Gaite-Montpamesse is a thermometer of the
French, and that of the Wintergarten, the Fleder-
maus cabaret platform and the Nollendorfplatz-
Theater of the German. But the representative
humour of the American people is, I believe, the
humour of the cheap vaudevilles and the bur-
lesque show. It is this humour that the post-cards
which I have described reflect: for in the cheap
vaudevilles and the burlesque shows one finds, in-
deed, this humour's provenience. The humour of
the burlesque show is a humour original with the
burlesque show: it is an even more original humour
than that of the cheap vaudevilles which is often
a mere slight polishing up of the burlesque humour
or a mere roughening and toughening up of the
already thrice distilled Broadway musical comedy
humour. And this burlesque humour therefore
doubtless places a more accurate finger upon the
national pulse. The loudest and most popular
laughter in the American theatres of today is pro-
voked by humour that has been graduated from
burlesque. The leading comedians of a dozen or

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242 COMEDIANS ALL

more shows of uniformly high prosperity through-
out the country have come to the more august stage
from burlesque, and have brought their wheezes
with them. The exceptionally popular humour of
Irvin Cobb is substantially the humour of the bur-
lesque show, somewhat refined for the purposes
of general distribution in a periodical that rolls
a canny eye at the papa and his housewife. The
most popular mot negotiated by President Wilson
on his speech route of 1918, the joke about mak-
ing the world safe for the democratic party,
originated with the comedian in Charlie Baker's
"Gay Morning Glories" show. Helen Green's ad-
mirable actors' boarding house and telephone
girls' humour' — some of the very best native
humour an American has set upon paper — was in
essence the purest burlesque show humour.

The satiric humour of George Ade, though, as
observed, probably the best American humour
since the time of Twain, is genetically less an
American than a British humour. On the surface
it is as American as a catcher's mit; its general
form and style are as thoroughly American as
Stein-Bloch clothes; but in its amazingly sharp
satire it is British. Ade's training and upbringing,
contrary to the general notion, were — I under-
stand from a source that seems thoroughly reliable

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 243

— less along banks of the Wabash lines than along
banks of the Thames lines. (His father, so I hear,
was of English stock and stubbornly read no other
newspaper than the London Telegraph, for which
he regularly subscribed.) The fine English sa-
tiric note in the son's writings may thus be ex-
plained. Whatever the facts, the one fact remains
that the humour of George Ade is intrinsically no
more a symptom of the national humour than the
vastly less fine but partly satiric writing of Charles
Hoyt was, in his day, intrinsically a symptom of
the national humour. The present-day American
mass humour is not the sly humour of Ade, but
the somewhat less recherche humour of Billy Wat-
son ("baggy comedian's clothes, toothpick in his
mouth, red nose, cuffs tied with ribbons, hatchet
in his hip pocket," so Arthur Ruhl describes him
in mat droll and excellent essay) — of Billy Wat-
son and his venerable and deathless "Kraus-
meyer's Alley." Just as the twenty-year-ago sly
American humour of Hoyt was less the national
humour of its day than the somewhat less recherche
humour of this selfsame Watson and this selfsame
"Krausmeyer*s Alley.*' (A nation's humour is in
general as unchanging as a nation's flag — a few
more stars, or a few more asterisks, perhaps, but
Watson's current immensely popular addendum to

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244 COMEDIANS ALL

"Krausmeyer's Alley," "A Gay Old Boy," is noth-
ing other than Harry Montague's famous "My
Uncle" of a quarter of a century ago, the lucrative
and nationally applauded standby of Waldron's
old Trocadero Burlesquers.)

The American national humour is not the de-
risory humour of the T wains and the Ades, but
the burlesque humour of the Petroleum V. Nashya
and the Irvin Cobbs. The humour of Ring
Lardner comes nearer the national pulse than the
humour of Montague Class, say, yet both these
humours are intrinsically of too fine and subtle a
left-handed quality, too sharp and incisive a power
of characterization — especially the humour of the
latter 1 — to bring them into a plurality of popular-
ity. The national humour is the low, broad, easy,
vulgar humour that appeals alike to the Elk and
the member of the Union Club, the motorman and
the owner of a Rolls-Royce, the congressman and
the chiropodist, the Y. M. C. A. superintendent
and the brothel keeper, the artist and the shoe
clerk: the humour that tickles alike the ribs of
ignoramus and intellectual, of rich and poor, of
rowdy and genteel, of black, white and tan. And
where other than in burlesque do we find this
humour in America? Whether spoken humour
or physical humour, this burlesque humour 1 — reg-

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 245

ularly graduated to the more legitimate popular
stage, to the popular magazines, to the popular
songs and hooks and moving pictures, and so given
a thorough national circulation — is more often
than any other form of American humour success-
ful in amusing the generality of the American
people. Thus, for one American who will laugh
at some such delicate mockery of Clyde Fitch's as
"Men are always hard on another man whom
women like," ten thousand will laugh at some such
burlesque show fancy as Krausmeyer's injunction
to Grogan to take his feet off the table "and give
the Limburger a chance." And for every Ameri-
can, rich or poor, black or white, Christian or
Quartermaster, who will be found to laugh at some
such literary drollery as Christopher Morley's ac-
count of the lecturer on Tennyson who by error
got into a home for female inebriates, there will be
found thirty thousand who will laugh at some such
burlesque drollery as Al Reeves' account of his ad-
ventures in urging the Salvation Army saver of
fallen women to save him two blondes and a
brunette for Saturday night.

The true fundamental national humour of
America — as of any other nation — rests, of
course, in its dirty story. The loose and ribald
anecdote of the Irishman and the minister's

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246 COMEDIANS ALL

daughter, of what was seen through the opera-
glass from the veranda of the Hebrew golf club,
of the widow and the college boy, of the girl
who went to the masked ball as a certain playing
card, and the like, constitute the N toward which
the national popular humour compass needle con-
stantly and unswervingly directs itself. And it is
because the burlesque show humour more closely
and brazenly than any other public form of
American humour approaches to this shall we say
deplorable index, that it vouchsafes the most ac-
curate public picture of the American national
humour. This burlesque humour, further, is of
typical American accent and expression, as the
burlesque show itself is a typical American
product: one will not find the like of it anywhere
in the world. And this is why the alien in-
vestigator, would he know the best available
criterion of the American scherzo, would rightly
and most appropriately be directed to a study of
that form of American public entertainment whose
humour most intimately and unabashedly dances
the hump-polka with what is the actual national
humour.

The humour of the burlesque show — the
genuine, full-blown and unaffected burlesque show
of Fourteenth Street, not the hybrid thing mani-

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 247

cured by the so-called burlesque wheel for the up-
town Columbia Theatre of Broadway — this humour
is as representatively and intrinsically American,
in all the fine bloom of its vulgarity, as the humour
of the comic valentine, the pie cinema or the bush
league bleachers. Its essence is the essence of the
nationally most popular comic cartoons as, for
example, the "Boobs," "Simps," "Foolish Ques-
tions," "No Brains" and "Mike and Ike" of Gold-
berg, the Hallroom Boys of McCill, the Mutt and
Jeff of Bud Fisher, the "Bringing Up Father" of
George McManus, the "Abie the Agent" of Hersh-
field — and the Yellow Kid of Outcault, and Foxy
Grandpa, and the Katzenjammer Kids, and the
various celebrated comic strips of the yesterdays.
For one American who laughs at the pungent,
satiric drawings of Webster or Hill or McCutcheon,
there are ten thousand who laugh at the low bur-
lesque stage sketches of Tad, of Opper, and of T.
E. Powers.

Puck was successful only so long as it stuck to
the barber-shop level: the day it attempted a more
elevated form of wit the office boy began figuring
how much the editor's spittoon would go for at
the auction sale. Life sticks sagaciously to
mother-in-law and Little Willie jokes and so keeps
alive. Judge sticks to yokel limericks about the

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248 COMEDIANS ALL

man who lived in Siam and pictures of dogs with
cans tied to their tails and thus keeps its head
above water. Hie United States has not one
humorous periodical of one-half the quality of the
British Punch, or one-tenth the quality of the
French Vie Parisienne, the Russian Loukomorye
and Novi Satirikon and Boudilnik, or the German
Simplicissirnus. The American comic paper re-
flects the highest popular level of the American
taste in humour as exactly as such a periodical as
the Saturday Evening Post, with its two millions of
circulation and its five millions of readers, reflects
the highest popular level of the American taste in
philosophy and aesthetics.

As, theatrically, "Krausmeyer's Alley" may be
accepted as a typical example of the American
humour, so many "La Cocotte Bleue," the Cluny
Theatre riot, be accepted as an emblem of the
French humour, and "A Little Bit of Fluff," the
dismal American failure, as an emblem of the
British, and an eternally popular Laufs and Kraatz
collaboration as an emblem of the German. The
American humour, more than the British, or
French, or even German, is a slapstick and seltzer
siphon humour. It is the humour of "Dere
Mable," of "Speaking of Operations," of K. C. B.,
of comedians speaking into telephones and receiv-

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THE NATIONAL HUMOUR 249
ing faces full of flour, of William F. Kirk, and
of Barney Gerard kicking Rose Sydell in the seat
of her tights. It is the humour of the Silk Hat
Harry cartoons, of such songs as "How're We
Gonna Keep the Boys on the Farm After They
Been to Gay Paree?", of postcards bearing the
inscription "Say, bo, get me! You're bughouse,"
of Louis Robie and the bass drum and ratchet and
suggestively torn strip of muslin. It is, in brief,
less the humour of the ironic Harry Leon Wilson,
or of the observant Kin Hubbard, or of the J. L.
Morgan of the shrewd club lampoons, or of the
F. P. Adams of parody classic verse, or of the
quaintly philosophical E. W. Howe, or of the muse-
ful Clare Briggs than the humour of the Yonkers
Statesman, "Bugs" Baer, Dinkelspiel, the Charlie
Chaplin inserts, Joe Oppenheimer's "Broadway
Belles," Roy L. McCardell, Ezra Kendall, Bert
Leslie, and the one about the cigar drummer and
the blonde.

§ 91

The Crook Play. — The modern Broadway crook
play, commonly held to he as typical and
characteristic an American product as a Muhlen-
berg College bachelor of arts or the Mann
Act, is actually no more indigenously Ameri-

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250 COMEDIANS ALL

can than Napravnik's "Dubroffsky." The mod-
ern Broadway crook play is a lineal descendant
of the German o-Austro-IIungarian crook play:
its blood relationship is more or less visible
in its every feature. The American Carters
and Marcins with their "Master Minds" and
"Cheating Cheaters" were in each instance antici-
pated by the Austro-Hungarian Sawa Zez-Mirskis
with their "Super-Scoundrels" (Der Obergauaer)
and "Cheated Cheaters" (Betrogene Betriiger), as
the American Armstrongs and McHughs with their
card-sharper "Greyhounds" and burlesque "Of-
ficers 666" were in each instance anticipated by
the Central European Karl Schiilers with their
"Card Sharpers" (Falschspieler) and Turzinsky-
Stifters with their burlesque "Don't Write Letters"
(Mann Soil Kerne Briefe Schreiben). The Broad-
way crook melodrama composer like Willard Mack
has always had a crook melodrama papa overseas
like Kurt Matull; the Broadway crook farce com-
poser like James Montgomery a crook farce papa
like Ferenz Molnar. The Americans have in none
of these cases been plagiarists — this is not the
point — but the species of crook plays which they
have written were in each case already familiar to
and popular with the Central European audience.
Not only in America but in Europe is the crook

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THEATRICAL WISE MEN 251
play, when it is done with a reasonable show of
skill, among the most prosperous and lucrative of
the numerous theatrical jay baits. The theory of
the local college critics that the high popularity of
the crook drama in America is a melancholy mark
of the inferior American theatrical taste is a theory
that suffers a swift hump when the Continental
(and particularly the French) statistics are
plumbed.

§ 92

The Theatrical Wise Men. — Probably no other
institution on earth is burdened with so many posi-
tive theories and rules of conduct as the theatre.
And in probably no other institution, save it be a
physical culture diet restaurant, are the positive
theories and rules of conduct so profitably to be
violated. The moment an oracular theory or law
is laid down in the theatre, that moment does it
become certain that by breaking it someone is due
shortly to make at least a quarter of a million dol-
lars.

A. H. Woods, probably the shrewdest com-
mercial manager in the American theatre, rejected
a ridiculously cheap advance offer of a sixty per
cent interest in the melodrama named "The Un-
known Purple" on the contention that the play con-

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252 COMEDIANS ALL

taihed a situation in which a wife failed to recog-
nize her husband after an absence of eight or ten
years, which situation, Mr. Woods informed the
author of the play, would never conceivably be
accepted as credible by a theatre audience. "The
Unknown Purple," with the situation, thereupon
proceeded to run for an entire theatrical year in
New York City alone.

When Arthur Hopkins announced that he was
about to produce "The Jest," this same canny Mr.
Woods voiced his conviction that so sombre a
tragedy could not conceivably draw more than a
very limited "highbrow" audience, as he termed it,
and could not consequently play to "big money."
The sombre "Jest" thereupon promptly turned out
to be the greatest financial dramatic success in
many years, playing lo the astonishingly high box-
office sale of over nineteen thousand dollars a week.

George M. Cohan, who probably knows more
about popular playmaking than all the rest of the
popular American playwrights combined, has said
in answer to an interviewer's query: "If you want
to sell anything to Americans, sell them what they
want. That goes for pants or plays. And give
them what they want quick! Shoot it over fast!
Tell your story so sharply that it will keep your
audience awake all the time following you! Get

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THEATRICAL WISE MEN 253
a plot and get it going at once! Don't give the
audience time to think!" Mr. Cohan rejected the
manuscript of "Peg o' My Heart" on the ground
that it moved too deliberately, that its story was
not shot over with sufficient punch and speed, mat
its plot maneuvering was so slow that an audience
would have too much time to think about it and
that, therefore, it would fail to hold an American
audience. "Peg o' My Heart" thereupon began
a record-breaking run that is still going on in the
remote tank towns and that has netted its author
and manager a great fortune.

Augustus Thomas, the leading American apostle
and professor of absolutism in dramatic technique
— in the theory that in order to succeed a drama
must be written according to hard and fast, tested
and inviolable, formulae — laboriously confected
"The Copperhead" according to the said formula;
and then found, upon the third night of its suc-
cessful New York presentation, that it was neces-
sary to the perpetuation of the play's success to turn
the chief principle of his main formula topsy-turvy.
Thus the first night enigma of Milt Shanks' loyalty
to the Federal government was on the third night
imparted to the audience in a hoarse down-stage
whisper by the rewritten Milt himself.

Daniel Arthur hesitated to produce Clare Kum-

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254 COMEDIANS ALL

mer's "Good Gracious Annabelle" as a music show
libretto because it was, he maintained, too absurd
a fable too artificially bandied. Hopkins there-
upon obtained the rights to the libretto from Arthur,
impudently produced the libretto as a straight
farce comedy without any music at all, and got
away with it.

These are five cases out of an available five
hundred.

§ 93

William Winter. — Re-reading the bulky opera
of the late William Winter, I am impressed more
than ever with the utter incompetence of the man as
a critic of the drama. A writer of many a felici-
tous phrase and fruity turn of sentence, he was yet
of the mind of a schoolboy, of the point of view of
a girl disappointed in love. Of his grotesque
morality and puritanism in matters of art, I do not
speak: these are of course familiar. What I speak
of was the man's almost complete lack of under-
standing of the fundamental requirements of crit-
icism. He was a critic of acting and 'drama in
precisely the same sense that the late William S.
Devery was a critic of sociology. His attitude was
generally the attitude of a Simon Legree without

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WILLIAM WINTER 255

slaves. Perpetually vexed, irritated, infuriated,
he would wildly brandish his cowhide about him,
would have at imaginary ghosts that were con-
stantly terrorizing him and, finding the ghosts
made of thin air, would suffer upon his own ear
the boomerang sting of the whip. Dancing then
and howling over the self-inflicted fetch, he would
seek to get even with the whip by loudly calling it
a rattlesnake. And it was this imprecation that
was duly set upon paper and called criticism.

If I seem to be indelicate in writing thus of a
dead man, I have no shuffling apologies to make.
The fact that Winter is dead doesn't increase my
respect for him in the slightest. And though I
hope that the good Lord God may rest the soul of
him in eternal peace, I can't resist the conviction —
come upon me since carefully re-reading his works
— that the mark of the man as a critic of the
theatre was best to be appraised in his acceptance
of public benefit alms, in the dour midnight of his
life, from the very actors whom he had labelled
dramatic maquereaux and the very actresses whom
his pale blue New England mind had denounced
as no better than harlots. It is to the credit of
Mrs. Minnie Maddem Fiske that she alone — of all
who were sought to play the hypocrite to such a

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256 COMEDIANS ALL

man in bis doddering, financially wrecked days —
remained a sufficiently acute critic of critics to show
the committee the door.

§ 94

Sex Appeal. — The disappointingly small meas-
ure of popular success achieved by the woman who
is agreed to be the best actress on the native stage,
a regular topic for speculation where critics of
the theatre are gathered together, is not so diffi-
cult of explanation as it would seem to be. The
woman in question, an unusually able player and
one further endowed with a musical speaking voice
and more than the average share of comeliness, is
yet utterly devoid of the sex appeal essential to
success on the popular dramatic stage. This ob-
servation would, in faith, be trite enough were it
not for the fact that the deficiency (doubtless thor-
oughly recognized by the excellent actress herself)
has never to my knowledge been attributed to her
even by her least friendly critics. And yet, pin
down her admirers and disfavourers one by one,
riddle their elaborately profound professorisms,
and one finds that in the subconscious nook of each
there hides, politely veiled in academic flim-flam,
this simple icicle truth.

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SEX APPEAL 257

The actress who thus, albeit indirectly, impresses
an audience, though she be the greatest actress in
her nation, will ever remain a popular failure.
The yokel sees never the role interpreted by the
actress, but the actress interpreted by the woman.
It is nonsense to say, as they do say, that this or that
stage young woman is New York's or Cleveland's
or Kansas City's favourite actress. It is more ac-
curate to say that the young woman, whoever she
happens to be, is New York's or Cleveland's or
Kansas City's favourite stage young woman.
When the Senior Class at Yale or Harvard thinks it
is voting for its favourite actress, it is actually vo-
ting for the girl it would individually like best to
take out to supper. Allen and Cinter did not sell
cigarettes by putting in their packets pictures of ac-
tresses as actresses — imagine the yokels collecting
photographs of Mrs. Sarah Cowell Lemoyne as the
Dowager Duchess de Coutras! — but by putting in
pictures of actresses as women with good shapes
and as girls with naughty dimples and soulful eyes.
To believe that the yokel cuts out half-tones of an
actress and pastes them on the wall over his bed
because he venerates the actress for her histrionic
virtuosity is to believe that the editor scholastically
puts them in his magazine for the same reason.

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258 COMEDIANS ALL

§ 95
The Pigeon-Hole Play. — The most ignorant criti-
cism visited upon a play in my memory was that
accorded Zoe Akins' "Papa" on its New York pre-
sentation. Confounded by something not duly
listed in the pigeon-holes, the gentlemen of the
press promptly concluded that the author had
failed in her attempt to write a kind of play that
was listed in the pigeon-holes when, of course, what
the author had tried plainly to do was to write a
kind of play that was not listed in the pigeon-holes.
Whether she failed to do this in sound fashion, or
whether she succeeded, is beside the point. The
point is tnat she was criticized not for what she
tried to do — whether, as I say, the accomplishment
was good or bad — but for what she deliberately
tried not to do. To take to the criticism of a play
like "Papa" a 'Turn to the Right" mind and a
"Three Faces East" technical appraisal is to shop
at a florist's for beefsteak. It is much as if one
were indignantly to criticize Culmhacher for its
lack of palliative massage properties or a horse
liniment for its taste.

§ 96

The Actor and the Trained Seal. — I trust that I

am not unduly pessimistic, yet it seems to me that

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THE ACTOR AND SEAL 259
each year the quality of acting in the American
theatre grows progressively worse. Save in the in-
stance of a half-dozen or so men and a half-dozen
or so women, the bulk of acting becomes each sea-
son more slovenly, more uncouth, more absurdly
incompetent That the actors themselves are
wholly to blame for this, I doubt. The average
actor, true enough, brings to his profession not
one-half the equipment that a fairly good barber
brings to his; and the average actress is ready to
call it quits when she has learned how to pronounce
three or four French words and to sit down with-
out automatically throwing her right leg over her
left. But despite this it seems to me that, though
the job were akin to driving nails into cobblestones,
these droll curios might yet be polished up a hit
and improved if there existed producers who knew
how to do the polishing and the improving. That
the average actor is willing to be helped, I haven't
the slightest doubt. But that the average producer
knows how to help him, I doubt seriously.

The producer makes the mistake of believing his
job done when he hires the actor. His job, in re-
ality, has then just begun. When the producer be-
comes indignant over the incompetence of the actor
he has hired, he becomes foolish. He has not hired
competence, though he is ever fond of deluding

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260 COMEDIANS ALL

himself with the tradition and hope that he has;
be has hired merely a large hunk of more or less
sensitive and impressionable wax. To expect this
clod to perform its work of its own accord is to
expect a phonograph to play without a needle, a
record and considerable winding. If the acting on
the American stage grows worse year by year, it is
because the producers have taken more and more
for granted the theory that the average actor knows
something about his work. The average actor
knows no more about his work than the average
reader on the staff of a magazine- knows about his
work. He knows that he mustn't stop to blow his
nose in the middle of a hot love scene, that he must
refrain from spitting on Aubrey Tanqueray's rug
and that he must look up the pronunciation of the
word "coniomycetus" — just as the magazine reader
knows that he mustn't bother the editor with stories
about the beautiful, seductive, mysterious Fifi
Pommard, alias Sophie Bohnensalat, the Ger-
man spy — but, like the reader, he knows very
little else. Of imagination, initiative, critical an-
alysis, artistic derring-do, neither vouchsafes a
trace.

If an actor gives a bad performance the fault is
the producing director's, just as if a trained seal
gives a bad performance the fault is the trainer's.

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THE ACTOR AND SEAL 261.
The director who, upon finding an actor, perfunc-
torily takes for granted the actor's ability to do the
right thing at the right moment is akin to the trainer
who, upon finding a seal, perfunctorily takes for
granted the seal's ability to intertwine the French
and American flags at the right moment. The actor
is not an independent body and mind, a creature
of invention and resolve: he is a mere mechanical
instrument He is the keyboard upon which the
producer plays the playwright's tunes. He is to
creative art what the nickelodeon is to De Pach-
mann. The producer who confidently regards him
otherwise is like the street urchin who fondly hopes
to start the slot piano going merely by shaking it.

§ 97

The Middle-Class Taste. — It is a common dud-
geon of the American professor-critics of the drama
that the low grade of American theatrical enter-
tainment is due to the low taste of the American
middle-class theatrical audience. Elevate the
taste of this middle-class, rid the auditorium of the
artistic and «sthetic predilections of our stock-
brokers, haberdashers, clothing salesmen, moving-
picture actors and other such mental and social oc-
toroons, and — they say — you will coincidentally

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262 COMEDIANS ALL

and sumritaneouflly elevate the quality of American

Let as suppose that this middle-class and its
plebeian taste were completely and summarily re-
moved from the American theatre and its erstwhile
loges occupied by, let us say, the aristocrats of
Europe and the aristocratic taste of Europe — in
direct example, let us further say, the aristocratic
taste of Great Britain. What would be die result?
Surveying the statistics of royalty's attendance
upon the London theatre during the last twelve
years, we find that what this aristocratic and culti-
vated taste chiefly patronized and relished was as
follows:

Feb. 12, 1907— His Majesty the King, accom-
panied by the Queen, visited the Apollo and saw
"The Stronger Sex," a third-rate popular comedy
by John Valentine.

Feb. 19, 1907— The Royal couple went to Wynd-
ham's and saw "When Knights Were Bold," a
fourth-rare flash-back romantic play the success of
which was due to the low comedy, slapstick antick-
ing of the actor James Welch in the role of Sir
Guy de Vere.

June 26, 1907 — They visited the Adelphi to see
the ancient rube ruffler, "The Corsican Brothers."

July 18, 1907— They went to the Vaudeville to

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MIDDLE-CLASS TASTE 263
see the adapted French farce, "Mrs. Ponderbury's
Past."

The King, while in Paris the same year without
the Queen, attended "Vous n'Avez Rien a De-
clarer" and "La Puce a l'Oreille," two particularly
hot ones, both at the Nouveautes, and Bernstein's
"The Thief." While the King was away, the
Queen took in Hall Cable's "The Bondman,"
"Raffles," "Miss Hook of Holland," the variety
show at the Palace, "The Great Conspiracy," "The
Belle of Mayfair" — and went a second time to see
both "The Stronger Sex" and James Welch's mon-
keyshines.

The Prince and Princess of Wales during this
season took in "The Stronger Sex" and "Sinbad the
Sailor," a Drury Lane extravaganza.

In 1908, 1 find that the aristocratic taste went in
for "A White Man" (called "The Squaw Man" in
this country) ; "Diana of Dobson's," the Cicely
Hamilton shopgirl romance; die naughty farce
"Dear Old Charlie"; the patriotic military flag:
wagger hight "The Flag Lieutenant"; "Marriages
of Mayfair," a Cecil Raleigh-Henry Hamilton
Drury Lane melodrama; "Lady Barbarity," an
R. C. Carton masterpiece; "Her Father" (twice), a
prototype of the Broadway play called "The Rain-
bow"; "The Gay Gordons," "The Belle of Brit-

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264 COMEDIANS ALL

tany," "The King of Cadonia," "Havana" and
similar song and dance shows; the venerable
"Lyons Mail"; "The Sway Boat," by W. T. Coleby,
and "The Early Worm," a laborious farce by
Frederick Lonsdale. The command performances
in this year were "The Flag Lieutenant," "The
Corstcan Brothers," "The Duke's Motto" and Al-
fred Sutra's "Builder of Bridges." .

The following year saw the King twice taking in
me Drury Lane melodrama called "The Whip."
The King also went to see "An Englishman's
Home," a yellow journal melopiece; "Arsene
Lupin," a detective play; "The Woman in the
Case," a Clyde Fitch melodrama attributed to
Theodore Kremer; a third-rate farce named "Mr.
Preedy and the Countess," subsequently done at
the Maxine Elliott Theatre in this country; a couple
of obscure "society plays" by obscure writers; and
a couple of leg shows in which the pretty Phyllis
Dare was appearing. The taste of the King was
concurred in by tbe Prince and Princess of Wales
and, save in the case of a vaudeville show at the
Alhambra, by the Queen. "The Lyons Mail" was
one of the command performances.

In 1910, the King elected Isabel Jay and "The
Balkan Princess," Lily Elsie and "The Dollar Prin-
cess," Gertie Millar and "Our Miss Gibbs," to-

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MIDDLE-CLASS TASTE 265
gether with "Alias Jimmy Valentine," "Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde," "The House of Temperley,"
"Tantalizing Tommy" and a Chauncey Olcott opus
called "The O'Flynn." The next four years found
Royalty attending in the main Bulwer Lytton's
"Money*' (a command performance in honour of
the visit of the German Emperor and the German
Empress!), the Robert Hichens Valeska Suratt
come "Bella Donna," the Horace Annesley Vachell
potboiler "Jelfs,** the coloured moving pictures at
the Scala, Charles Klein's "Third Degree" at the
Garrick, James Montgomery's Broadway crook
farce "Ready Money," the suggestive French farce
"The Glad Eye" (here called "The Zebra" in the
Paul Potter adaptation). Cicely Courtneidge in the
"Princess Caprice" music show, the song and dance
shows called "The Girl in the Taxi" and "The
Dancing Mistress," the movie "Quo Vadis," a va-
riety show, a revival of "The Silver King," the
Dniry Lane extravaganza "Sleeping Beauty," the
Third Avenue plumber's delight "Mr. Wu," the girl
shows called "The Cinema Star" and "The Mar-
riage Market," a vaudeville bill at the Palace, and
"Grumpy" at the New Theatre.

The war year of 1915 saw Queen Alexandra,
Princess Victoria and Princess Maude of Fife for-
getting their troubles at a musical comedy named

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266 COMEDIANS ALL

"Betty" and the Queen and Princess Mary taking
in "Potash and Perlmutter" and the vaudeville
show at the Coliseum — the King remaining away
from the theatre save on the occasion of war benefit
performances. In the subsequent war year of
1916, the Prince of Wales, accompanied by Prince
Albert, went to the Palace to lay an eye to the
cuties in "The Passing Show"; the Queen, accom-
panied by the Crand Duchess George of Russia,
took in "Puss in Boots" at Drury Lane; the same
ladies, joined by the Princess Victoria, the follow-
ing week (Jan. 18) went to a vaudeville show;
the same ladies — the King still remaining away
from the theatre — on May 29 took in "Peg o* My
Heart"; and the Queen, on July 10, sat alone
through a something called "The Bing Boys Are
Here." And the seasons of 1917-1919 saw the
movie called "Intolerance," Al Woods* "Friendly
Enemies," a couple of vaudeville shows, Edward
Sheldon's "Romance" and a revival of Sydney
Grundy's "Pair of Spectacles" the especial marks
of the aristocratic favour.

During these dozen years, while the aristocratic
eye was popping at the hack comedies of Carton,
the blood and thunder melodramas of Drury Lane,
the red-vest vaudeville acts at the Alhambra and
the shapely legs of the Adelphl chorus girls, there

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MIDDLE-CLASS TASTE 267

were being presented just around the corner — and
passed up — the great plays of the great dramatic
writers of all time, ancient and modem. In 1907,
with Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell" at the Waldorf,
His Majesty went instead to Somerset Maugham's
"Lady Frederick" at the Court. In 1908, with
D'Annunzio's "La Figlia di Jorio" at the Shaftes-
bury, Her Majesty elected instead a musical com-
edy by Adrian Ross and Leslie Stuart in which
Laurence Crossmith was springing comical jokes.
In 1909, with Oalderon at the Aldwych and Oliver
Goldsmith at the Haymarket, the Prince and Prin-
cess of Wales voted for Gladys Cooper's rendition
of a Blanche Ring song in a Gaiety show and for
a Vaudeville bill at the Empire. In 1910, with
Shakespeare at the Court and Shaw at the Duke of
York's, the royal family made instead for a Paul
Armstrong melodrama at the Comedy and a look at
Emmy Whelen at Daly's. With Synge, Schnitzler,
Galsworthy, Hervieu playing down the block, Buck-
ingham Palace has ever generally selected instead
a bedroom farce, a crook melodrama or a leg
show.

Let us therefore under the circumstances invite
our American professors to make dramatic criti-
cism somewhat safer for democracy.
THE END

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