Greenwich Village Part 20

For still the Village is, or has been, inarticulate. Individually it has found speech--it has expressed itself in diverse and successful forms. But there remains a void of voices! A community must strongly utter something, and must find mouths and mouthpieces for the purpose.

It was hard to find, hard to locate, hard to vocalise, this message of the Village; eventually it came up from the depths and pitched its tone bravely and sweetly, so that men might hear and understand.

The need was for something concrete and yet varied, which could cry out alone,--a delicious voice in the wilderness, if you like! There have been play-acting companies, "The Washington Square Players," "The Provincetown Players," and others. But something was still wanting.

Sometimes it strikes us that wonderful things happen haphazard like meteors and miracles. But I believe if we could take the time to investigate, we would find that most of these miraculous and glorious oaks grow out of a quiet commonplace acorn.

Richard Wagner once held an idea--perhaps it would better be termed an ideal--concerning art expression. He declared (you may read it in "_Oper und Drama_" unless you are too war-sided) that all the art forms belonged together: that no one branch of the perfect art form could live apart from its fellows, that is, in its integral parts. He contended (and enforced in Bayreuth) that all the arts were akin: that the brains which created music, drama, colour effects, plastic sculptural effects--anything and everything that belonged to artistic expression--were, or should be, welded into one supreme artistic expression. He believed this implicitly, and like other persons who believe well enough, he "got away with it." In Bayreuth, he established for all time a form of synthetic art which has never been rivalled.

Now Wagner has very little apparently to do with Greenwich Village.

And yet this big world-notion is gaining way there. They are finding--as anyone must have known they would find--a new mood expression, a new voice. And, wise, not in their generation, but in all the generations, the Village has seized on this new vehicle with characteristic energy.

The new Greenwich Village Theatre which Mrs. Sam Lewis is G.o.dmothering, is--unless many sensible and fa.r.s.eeing persons are much mistaken--going to be the new Voice of the Village. It is going to express what the Villagers themselves are working for, day and night: beauty, truth, liberty, novelty, drama. It is going, in its theatrical form, to fill the need for something concrete and yet various, something involving all, yet evolved from all; something which shall somehow unite all the scattered rainbow filaments of Our Village into a lovely texture with a design that even a Philistine world can understand.

"Young, new American playwrights first," says Mrs. Lewis. "After that as many great plays of all kinds as we can find. But we want to open the channel for expression. We want to give the Village a voice."

And when she says the Village she does not mean just the section technically known as Greenwich. She means--I take it--that greater neighbourhood of the world, which is fervently concerned in the new and thrilling and wonderful and untrammelled things of life. They have no place to sing, out in the every-day world, but in the Village they are going to be heard.

And I think the new Greenwich Village Theatre is going to be one of their most resonant mouthpieces!

A LAST WORD

And after all this,--what of the Village? Just what is it?

"In my experience," said the writing man of sententious sayings, "there have been a dozen 'villages.' The Village changes are like the waves of the sea!"

Interrogated further, he mentioned various phases which Greenwich had known. The studio-and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and anarchy era, the futurist fad, the "free love" cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball period, the psychoa.n.a.lysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, the arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting mania; and other violent and more or less transient enthusiasms which had possessed the Village during the years he had lived there. Not wholly transient, he admitted.

Something of each and all of them had remained--had stuck--as he expressed it. The Village a.s.similates ideas with miraculous speed; it gobbles them up, gets strong and well on the diet, and asks for more. It is so eager for novelty and new ideals and new view-points that if nothing entirely virgin comes along, it will take something quite old, and give it a new twist and adopt it with Village-like ardour.

Oh, you mustn't laugh at the Village, you wise uptowners,--or if you laugh it must be very, very gently and kindly, as you laugh at children; and rather reverently, too, in the knowledge that in lots of essentials the children know ever so much more than you do!

It is true that changes do come over the Village like the waves of the sea, even as my friend said. But they are colourful waves, prismatic waves, fresh, invigourating and energetic waves, carrying on their crests iridescent seaweed and glittering sh.e.l.ls and now and then a pearl. The Village has its treasure, have no doubt of that; never a phase touches it but leaves it the richer for the contact.

You, too, going down into this port o' dreams will win something of the wealth that is of the heart and soul and mind. You will come away with the sense of wider horizons and deeper penetrations than you knew before. You will find novel colours in the work-a-day world and a sort of quaint music in the song of the city. Some of the glowing reds and greens and purples that you saw those grown-up children in the Village joyously splashing on their wooden toys or the walls of their absurd and charming "shops" will somehow get into the grey fabric of your life; and a certain eager urging undertone of idealism and hope and st.u.r.dy aspiration will make you restless as you follow your common round. Perhaps you will go back. Perhaps you will keep it as a rainbow memory, a visualisation of the make-believe country where anything is possible. But in any case you will not forget.

Many a place gets into your mind and creates nostalgia when you are far from it. But Greenwich Village gets into your heart, and you will never be quite able to lose the magic of it all the days of your life.

THE END