Seeing Things At Night Part 19

None of us cuts much of a figure complaining about all the things in the world he doesn't like if he hasn't made a practice of yelling his head off for such few things as meet with his approval in the theater or out of it. More than that, Mr. Craig ought to remember that if there were no applause in the American theater there would be no curtain speeches by David Belasco.

A Test for Critics

Just when everything seems to be moving more or less smoothly somebody comes along and raises the entrance requirements for dramatic critics.

Clayton Hamilton is the latest to suggest a new standard. His test for reviewers consists of three point-blank questions, as follows:

One--Have you ever stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens?

Two--Have you ever climbed to the Acropolis by moonlight?

Three--Have you ever walked with whispers into the hushed presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini?

Our grade on the test is thirty-three and one-third per cent, which is not generally regarded as a pa.s.s mark.

We have stood bareheaded in the nave of Amiens. We felt more bareheaded than usual because a German aeroplane was dropping bombs somewhere about the town. And yet even in this part of the examination we can hardly claim a perfect average. Come to think of it, we didn't exactly stand there in the nave at Amiens. We had heard of the increased difficulty of hitting a moving target, and whenever a bomb went off we found ourselves shifting rapidly from one foot to another. We were not minded that any German in the sky should look through the roof and mistake us for an ammunition dump.

As for the rest, our failure is complete. We know that the Acropolis is a building in Athens or thereabouts. We have never seen it in moonlight or sunlight. We are not even sure that we would climb up. Our resolve would be largely influenced by the number of steps. Clayton Hamilton does not mention that. His is essentially the critical rather than the reportorial mind. We, for instance, are less interested in the fact that Clayton Hamilton climbed up by moonlight than in the time as caught by an accurate stop watch and the resulting respiration. We think that the Frari Madonna of Bellini is a picture, and Venice is our guess as to its home. Venice or Florence is always the best guess for Madonnas.

The only solution we can think of is to ask the managers to shift our seats for the present from the fourth row of the orchestra to the second balcony. Of course, our fighting blood is up. We are determined to qualify as soon as possible. Some day we will climb that Acropolis roped together with Louis De Foe, Charles Darnton and Burns Mantle. There will be a little trepidation in the ascent, to be sure. One false step, one blunder, would be fatal, and we have known the other members of the party to make these blunders. But we will reach the top at last and stand wonderingly in the moonlight, slowly recovering our breath. Mr.

Darnton will undoubtedly be the first to speak. He will look at the ghostly architecture silvered in the moonlight, and then he will murmur "Big hit!"

Later we will see the Frari Madonna, but it seems a little dangerous to predict that all the members of the party will walk with whispers.

Perhaps that is not vital. At any rate, when the journey is completed we purpose to go straight from the dock to the office of A. H. Woods. If he consents to see us we are going to address him in this fashion:

"Mr. Woods, we wish to make an apology to you. Some months ago we reviewed several of your shows, in spite of the fact that we had never climbed to the Acropolis in moonlight or walked with hushed whispers into the presence of the Frari Madonna of Bellini. Now that has been remedied. We have come back with a new vision. We are prepared to review the performances of your productions all over again. Do you think you could fix us up for to-morrow night with a couple of good aisle seats for _Up in Mabel's Room_?"

Gray G.o.ds and Green G.o.ddesses

A railroad train is bearing down upon the hero, or maybe it is a sawmill, or a band of savage Indians. Death seems certain. And if there is a heroine, something worse than death awaits her--that is, from the Indians. Sawmills draw no s.e.x distinctions. At any rate, things look very black for hero and heroine, but curiously enough, even at the darkest moment, I have never been able to get a bet down on the outcome.

Somehow or other the relief party always arrives just in time, on foot, or horseback, or even through the air. The worst of it is that everybody, except the hero and the heroine and the villain, knows that the unexpected is certain to happen. It is not a betting proposition and yet it remains one of the most thrilling of all theatrical plots.

William Archer proves in _The Green G.o.ddess_ that he is what Broadway calls a showman, as well as being the most famous technician of his day.

He has taken the oldest plot in the world and developed it into the most exciting melodrama of the season.

Curiously enough, Mr. Archer has said that when he first thought of the idea for _The Green G.o.ddess_ he wanted to induce Shaw to collaborate with him on the play. It would have been an interesting combination.

Shaw might have fooled everybody by following the probabilities and killing the heroine and hero coldly and completely.

Mr. Archer, however, as the author of _Play Making_, knows that it is wrong to fool an audience, and so he kills only one of the beleaguered party, which is hardly a misfortune, since it enables the heroine, after a decent period of mourning, to marry the man she loves. As the Scriptures have it, joy cometh in the mourning.

Archer probably did not set out to show just how much better he could do with a thriller than Theodore Kroner or Owen Davis. His scheme was broader than that. Satire was in his mind as well as melodrama. He began his play with much deft foolery at the expense of the imperially minded English, by making his villainous rajah far more wise in life and literature than his English captives. When the rajah asks the brave English captain which play of Shaw he prefers, the gallant officer replies acidly: "I never read a line of the fellow." At this point in the play Mr. Archer and Mr. Arliss between them have succeeded in making the rajah such an altogether attractive person that a majority of the people in the audience are eager to have him obtain his revenge and quite reconciled to the heroine's accepting his marked attentions and becoming the chief wife in the royal harem of Rukh.

But melodrama is stronger stuff than satire. In the beginning, the playwright was melodramatic with an amused sort of tolerance, but then the sheer excitement and rush of action seized him by the coattails and dragged him along helter-skelter. Satire was forgotten and the hero and heroine, confronted by death, began to speak with the round and eloquent mouth, as folk in danger always do in plays. The rajah became more villainous scene by scene and the little group of English captives braver and braver. They even developed a trace of intelligence.

None of this is cited as cause for grave complaint against William Archer. Greater men than he have tried to play with melodrama and have been bitten by it. Shakespeare began _Hamlet_ as a searching and serious study of the soul of man, but before he was done the characters were fighting duels all over the place and going mad and partic.i.p.ating in all the varied experiences which come to men in melodrama. After all, George Arliss succeeds in holding the rajah up as an admirable and interesting person, despite all the circ.u.mstances of the plot, which are leagued against him, and the author has been kind enough to permit him a cynical and cutting line at the end, even though he is deprived of the privilege of slaying his captives.

But for the fact that the hero and heroine are rescued by aeroplanes rather than a troop of cavalry or a camel corps, it can hardly be said that there is any new twist or turn in _The Green G.o.ddess_. The surprising and undoubted success of the play reveals the fact that the so-called popular dramatists and the theorists are not so many miles apart as one might believe at first thought. When Mr. Archer brings in the relief party of aviators just at the crucial moment, as hero and heroine are about to be slain, he has peripety in mind. But Theodore Kremer, who very possibly never heard of peripety, would do exactly the same thing. In other words, the technician is the man who invents or preserves labels to be pasted on the intuitive practices of his art.

_The Green G.o.ddess_ is sound and shipshape in structure, for all the fact that it is hardly a searching study of any form of life save that found within the theater. It is doubly welcome, not only as a rousing melodrama but, also, as an apt and pertinent reply to the question so frequently voiced by actors and playwrights: "Why doesn't one of these critics that's always talking about how plays should be written sit down and do one himself?"

If Archer is a little overcautious in taking human life in _The Green G.o.ddess_, the law of averages still prevails, for Eugene O'Neill has made up the deficit in _Diff'rent_ by rounding off his little play with a double hanging. This tragedy, described on the h.o.a.rdings as "a daring study of a s.e.x-starved woman," has much of O'Neill's characteristic skill in stage idiom, but it is much less convincing than the same author's _The Emperor Jones_. Indeed _Diff'rent_ is essentially a reflection of the other play, in which O'Neill states again in other terms his theory that man is invariably overthrown by the very factor in life which he seeks to escape. Emma of _Diff'rent_, like the Emperor Jones, completes a great circle in her frantic efforts to escape and, after refusing a young man, because of a single fall from grace, comes thirty years after to be an eager and unhappy spinster who throws herself at the head of a young rascal. With the growth of realism in the drama, criticism has become increasingly difficult, since the playwright's apt answer to disbelief on the part of the critics is to give dates, names, addresses and telephone numbers. "Let the captious be sure they know their Emmas as well as I do before they tell me how she would act," says O'Neill menacingly to all who would question the profound truth of his "daring study of a s.e.x-starved woman." Of course, the question is just how well does O'Neill know his Emmas, but this is to take dramatic criticism into a realm too personal for comfort.

Seemingly, O'Neill and the other daring students of s.e.x-starvation are well informed. Into the mind of the woman of forty-five they enter as easily as if it were guarded by nothing more than swinging doors. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as a lodge room, for not all may enter, but only those who know the ritual. This is annoying to the uninitiated, but we can only bide our time and our protest until some one of the young men takes the next step and gives us a complete and inside story of the psychology of maternity.

It might be possible to make a stand against the a.s.surance of some of the younger realists by saying that truth does not lie merely in the fact of being. Every day the most palpable falsehoods are seeking the dignity of truth by the simple expedient of occurring. Nature can be among the most fearsome of liars. Still the fundamental flaw of the younger realists does not lie here so much as in the fact that, as far as art goes, truth depends entirely on interpretation rather than existence. No man can set down a story fact for fact with the utmost fidelity and then step back and say: "This is a work of art because it is true." Art lies in the expression of his reaction to the facts.

O'Neill's method in _Diff'rent_ is quite the reverse of the artistic. He is, for the moment, merely a scientist. Pity, compa.s.sion and all kindred emotions are rigorously excluded. Rather, he says: "What is all this to me?" There is no spark of fire in neutrality. The artist must care.

Though a creator, he is one of the smaller G.o.ds to whom there is no sanction for a lofty gesture of finality with the last pat upon the clay. He cannot say, "Let there be light," and then take a Sabbath. His place is at the switchboard. In his world he is creator, property man and prompter, too. The show can go on only most imperfectly without him.

The Cosmic "Kid"

Every little while some critic or other begins to dance about with all the excitement of a lonely watcher on a peak in Darien and to shout, as he dances, that Charlie Chaplin is a great actor. The gra.s.s on that peak is now crushed under foot. Harvey O'Higgins has danced there and Mrs.

Fiske and many another, but still the critics rush in. Of course, a critic is almost invariably gifted with the ability not to see or hear what any other commentator but himself writes about anything, but there is more than this to account for the fact that so many persons undertake to discover Chaplin. As in the case of all great artists, he is able to convey the impression, always, of doing a thing not only for the first time but of giving a special and private performance for each sensitive soul in the audience. It is possible to sit in the middle of a large and tumultuous crowd and still feel that Charlie is doing special little things for your own benefit which n.o.body else in the house can understand or enjoy.

Personally we never see him in a new picture without suddenly being struck with the thought, "How long has this been going on?" Each time we leave the theater we expect to see people dancing in the streets because of Chaplin and to meet delegations with olive wreaths hurrying toward Los Angeles. We don't. Unfortunately Americans have a perfect pa.s.sion for flying into a great state of calm about things and, for all the organized cheering from the top of the peak in Darien, we take Chaplin much too calmly at all moments except when we are watching him. Phrases which are his by every right have been wasted on lesser people. Walter Pater, for instance, lived before his time and was obliged to spend that fine observation, "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the earth have come and the eyelids are a little weary" upon the Mona Lisa.

The same ends of the same earth have come upon the head of Charlie Chaplin. Still Mr. Pater, if he had lived, would have been obliged to amend his observation a little. The eyelids are not weary. Unlike the Mona Lisa, Chaplin is able to shake his head every now and then and break free from his burden. In these great moments he seems to stand clear of all things and to be alone in s.p.a.ce with nothing but sky about him. To be sure the earth crashes down on him again, but he bears it without blinking. It is only his shoulders which sag a little.

Charlie seems to us to fulfil the demand made of the creative artist that he shall be both an individual and a symbol at the same time. He presents a definite personality and yet he is also Man who grins and whistles as he clings to his spinning earth because he is afraid to go home in the dark. To be much more explicit, there is one particular scene in _The Kid_ in which Chaplin having recently picked up a stray baby finds the greatest difficulty in getting rid of it. Balked at every turn, he sits down wearily upon a curbstone and suddenly notices that just in front of him there is an open manhole. First he peers down; then he looks at the child. He hesitates and turns a project over in his mind and reluctantly decides that it won't do. Every father in the world has sat at some time or other by that manhole. Moreover, in the half suggested shake of his head Chaplin touches the paternal feeling more closely than any play ever written around a third act in a nursery on Christmas Eve. We can all watch him and choke down half a sob at the thought that after all the Life Force is supreme and you can't throw 'em down the manholes.

Many a good performance on the stage is purely accidental. Actors are praised for some trick of gesture or a particular note in the voice of which they are quite unconscious. We raved once over the remarkable fidelity of accent in an actress cast to play the role of a shop girl in a certain melodrama and it was not until we saw her the next season, when she was cast as a d.u.c.h.ess, that we realized that there was no art about it. Chaplin does not play by ear. His method is definite, and it could not seem so easy if it were not carefully calculated. He does more with a gesture than almost anybody else can do by falling downstairs.

He can turn from one mood to another with all the agility of a polo pony. And in addition to being one of the greatest artists of our day he is more fun than all the rest put together.

There must be a specially warm corner in h.e.l.l reserved for those parents who won't let their children see Charlie Chaplin on the ground that he is too vulgar. Of course, he is vulgar. Everybody who amounts to anything has to touch earth now and again to be revitalized. Chaplin has the right att.i.tude toward vulgarity. He can take it or let it alone.

Children who don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed of much of their childhood. However, they can make it up in later years when the old Chaplin films will be on view in the museums and carefully studied under the direction of learned professors in university extension courses.

A Jung Man's Fancy

Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and went to Heaven. It is just as well. The strain had become a little wearing. We had Liberty Loan orators, too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came to be something like being a permanent member of a cheering section. All that is gone now. Pointing with pride has become rude. The interpretation of life has been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick up any new novel at random and the chances are that it will begin about as follows:

"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western sh.o.r.e of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back of the town--called in derision by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing'--was almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, gaunt men, who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived."

On page four the reader will find that young Hugh has been apprenticed to work on the sewers and after that, as the writer warms to his task, things begin to grow less cheerful. This particular exhibit happens to be taken from Sherwood Anderson's _Poor White_, but if we go north to Gopher Prairie, celebrated by Sinclair Lewis in _Main Street_, we shall find: "A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs--vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull--the delicacy of a mining camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farm wives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home."

Wander as you will through the novels of the year, I a.s.sure you that things will be found to be about the same. Of course, it is possible now and again to get away from the stale beer, but once a story enters prohibition time the study of starved souls and complexes begins. There are also books in which there isn't any mud, but these pay particular attention to the stifling dust.