The American Country Girl Part 23

The larger breadths of musical repertory are not so far away from the remote country places as formerly, now that the victrola and other instruments of like kind bring a knowledge of the great orchestral and operatic pa.s.sages to our very sitting-room. Every village should have this help in order to understand the great music that without it might be shut off from us. There should be one in every social center for general use in the community. A good way is for some member of the music-study committee to give a description of the opera or the oratorio, with comments on the particular pa.s.sage that the instrument can render; then the listeners are better able to understand what is being played and by the imagination to place the solos in their right background as they are being heard; an impression of the work as a whole will be thus gained that will to some extent approach the composite scene as it is shown on the stage. "Ah! can you imagine what the victrola means to us out here on this prairie!" wrote a friend from western Nebraska. This may be the experience of every rural circle the country over if it will only have community spirit enough to work together and acquire the music-reproducing apparatus.

Another thing that can be done is to get together all the people in the community that can play on any kind of instrument, and make them play together. Do not despise the day of small things. There must be a beginning. It will not be long before we can do more in any village, and at last we can have music of a higher order to drive the ills of isolation out of our atmosphere and introduce a healthful harmony in their place. If a boy belonged to an orchestra that met on Monday and Friday evenings for practise, to a cla.s.s in voice on Tuesday evening, and had engagements with groups of young men and young women to train for concerts all the other evenings of the week and was to sing in the church choir on Sunday, is it possible that he would feel that he could be spared to go away to the city to live? The case of the Country Girl will be exactly parallel. Her voice is the leading voice in the quartette; she is necessary to the musical atmosphere of the village; she is the hostess everywhere; she cannot be spared from any village and country life that is full of musical and other social engagements. And among the influences that beneficently endow human beings, the one that is at once most welding, most unifying, and most delighting is music.

CHAPTER XXV

THE PLAY IN THE HOME

O little bulb, uncouth Rugged, and rusty brown, Have you some dew of youth?

Have you a crimson crown?

Plant me and see What I shall be-- G.o.d's fine surprise Before your eyes!

--_M. D. Babc.o.c.k._

CHAPTER XXV

THE PLAY IN THE HOME

The development of musical taste and the power to enjoy the works of the great composers is closely akin to the ability to appreciate the sister art of the drama. The art that has grown out of that imitative impulse, which is so deeply implanted in human nature and has reached such heights in the hands of genius, has modest stages of growth that may be seen in the daily programs of the home, the school, the playground, in all the walks of children and of grown people. To be able to tell a story, and show it up with a little dramatic imitation, is to add to the success of the social queen, the drummer, the one who influences and manages men or women in any field. There are people who think it well worth while to spend much time in the study of the art of expression, just to add to their powers of entertainment when they wish to use this form of culture in the home circle only. It is not at all a bad thing to do. Thus to train the voice for sweet and fine or for powerful and striking modulations, to give the face new power of showing emotion, to win also the help of gesture, is to add to one's resources and to make them a greater source of enjoyment in the daily walks of life.

It is hardly possible to think of society in any age of the world since we became human beings when the intercourse of people was not lighted up with electric bits of humor, joking and ridicule, based on the dramatic principle of imitation. But when the day came for our solemn ancestors in New England to appear on the scene, they concocted a theory of duty that was not favorable to these pleasurable forms of activity.

Yet, as we have seen, these subdued people loved music and they loved beauty in all forms. And when beauty could be had along with what they considered a pure and dignified aspect of expression, they winked at the keen pleasure that they felt and said nothing against it.

An interesting story of Catherine Beecher, daughter of the great New England theologian, Dr. Lyman Beecher, ill.u.s.trates this. It is related in the autobiography of her father that she once devised a play and prepared, unknown to her parents, to give it in the kitchen of their home in Litchfield, Connecticut. The unsuspicious parents, it seems, did not notice that the neighbors were dropping in with a very unusual simultaneousness and that after supper an unwonted fire was being built in the parlor. Soon the door into the kitchen was opened with a flourish, a curtain was seen to have been strung across the room, Roman senators began to stalk across the stage--the kitchen floor--and a good rousing dip was taken by all into the fountain of antique romance. After it was over the stern father, who had been too greatly overwhelmed by the events of the evening to make any objection, whispered to that favorite daughter of his that it had all been very interesting but--better not do that again! Catherine got off easily, considering the repute in which dramatic representations were held by our forefathers.

Temptations to evil, at least, they were considered to be, if not the very path itself.

Yet Catherine Beecher made many plays, devised in large part from the plots of approved and semi-pious story-books, and these were enacted at school and at the picnics of her large circle of brothers and sisters.

Moreover her sister Harriet (afterward Harriet Beecher Stowe) being at about this period of her youth filled with the aspiration to become a great tragic poet, wrote reams and reams of blank verse on a cla.s.sic theme developed in dramatic form. By this time, however, the elder dominant sister Catherine must have seen the error of her ways, for finding Harriet one day in the act of composition, she took her precious play away from her, bidding her to cease this waste of time and go to work on her Butler's _a.n.a.logy of Nature and Religion_. And Harriet obeyed.

This story is told to afford one ill.u.s.tration of the fact that the divine endowments of human genius cannot be so easily crushed out. A theory will not accomplish it.

Catherine and Harriet Beecher were not the only possessors of glowing dramatic inspirations in the early days. We had not been fully settled here very many l.u.s.trums before the submerged river of artistic feeling came to the surface in the form of vivid oratory and elaborate dialogue; and when there began to be Sunday Schools there were Sunday School concerts with tableaux of an unworldly sort, with dialogues and with companies of young people who, in a small and innocuous way, engaged in exercises that might be called acting. This was found more or less all over New England and went with the New England migration into New York, and Ohio, and then farther west. Many thousands of angels with tinsel crowns and tissue-paper wings have filled the s.p.a.ces between pulpit and organ in the little white churches that have sprung up beside every hill along what we may call the New England belt--the course of the travels westward across the continent as the generations of descendants have pa.s.sed on and built and subdued the soil and planted schools and churches along the northern lat.i.tudinal lines.

The story of Catherine Beecher ill.u.s.trates too the fact that the prejudice in the dwellers in country districts against the use of dramatic forms of entertainment is based after all not so much upon the dramatic representation itself as upon certain conditions and a.s.sociations often found connected with theatrical displays as carried on in larger towns and cities and believed to be necessary to the existence of theatrical life.

There is a village in Illinois with a population of nine hundred where the majority of the church-going people--and most of the inhabitants of the town belong to that cla.s.s--have been of the opinion that it is a wicked thing to go to see a play if it is enacted by some company of play-actors such as might come along on their theatrical route; yet in that town for years the townspeople have been giving plays of their own, in which nearly the whole population of the place would join, old and young, rich and poor, wise and unwise. The whole family from grandmother to grandchild will sometimes appear in one play, and all the cousins and relatives of the whole "team-haul community" will come to see. They give many standard melodramas, and they have also tried their hand at Shakespearean drama, to the great enjoyment and uplift of themselves, both those that thoroughly capture the meaning of the play by training for the parts, and those that closely if charitably attend and listen.

Why should not this be done in every small town? Why should not the unused building, an old barn, a store-loft, be transformed into a country theater, where the whole village may a.s.semble twice a week or oftener, and run through a play together, getting joy and culture at once?

If once the ingrained, inherited prejudice, handed down from those misinterpreting honorable ancestors of ours, could be overcome, the plunge might be taken and the drama could become the education and inspiring agent that it has the capacity to be in our homes, our schools, and our towns and villages.

Especially to the remote village and to the lonely farm would this form of entertainment be a benefit. Do we not need this also to help lift the ban of loneliness and to supply that elasticity of spirit that means life to us? Companionship is our lack, the impact of various lives upon ours, the stirring of resentment against wrong or of enthusiastic approval of the good and n.o.ble that comes from the clash of motives, right and wrong, wise and unwise. If we are denied the opportunity to see and feel all this in the scenes from actual life in which we ourselves in our own persons partic.i.p.ate, we may receive some portion at least of the education to be derived from such impact by living for a time in the imagined world of the dramatist's creation and by watching the constant intricate play of emotion in the dialogue. And this we can in no other way do so well as by taking a part in the drama and appropriating it for our own; by living in that part, adopting the imagined circ.u.mstances for our own and following out the problem in the character represented and pursuing his fate to the bitter end. To do that is to gain to some extent the effect of companionship and its enlightening, enlarging and satisfying influence. To the extent that we are able to do this shall we combat and overcome the stagnation and the pain of loneliness.

As a by-product of the same exercise, we shall gain a new knowledge of our own capacity. We shall take a long step in the direction of obeying the old dictum to "know thyself." If, for instance, we are reading the part of Hamlet, and are trying to adopt his life and problem for the time being for our own, we learn how much we could suffer, how strongly we could determine, how fiercely we could doubt and yet struggle on, how tenderly we could love and yet resign, how all these things we could feel if we were really the Hamlet of the great play of Shakespeare.

In this way we gain an enlargement of our own nature and receive inspirations to heroism on our own part. This is not wasted time, for there is no life that does not afford opportunity for heroism or that does not need inspirations to courage and fort.i.tude.

There are people who do not enjoy reading a play. They miss the constant running description of movement and gesture, of scenery and color and background, of meaning and prophecy and scope that are found in a story or in narrative of any kind. They are not accustomed to supplying the pictures of the story from the resources of their own imagination.

However valuable a discipline it may be for them to learn how to make up imaginary backgrounds instead of depending upon the writer's aid, to that form of discipline they will not give the trouble. But if such readers will take the play into the family circle, and using several copies of the text, a.s.sign parts to each of the family, and thus read the text aloud, letting the words spoken by each of the characters give the suggestion for action, and encouraging each one to give the proper expression and gesture as he reads his part, the meaning will come clear as the scene goes on, and the proper enjoyment of the play as a play will enter into each one that shares the cast. If this does not happen with the first reading, it will come with the second or third. It is a pretty poor play that will not bear several readings; while as for the greatest of dramatists, Shakespeare, his plays will stand many and many a reading. It would be a good winter's enjoyment on a far away farm, for the family to set apart one or two evenings a week to be given to reading of the plays by the greatest poet and dramatist. Several plays would do for one winter and the whole thirty-six of them would last for several years, and then one could begin again at the beginning and read them over with renewed interest and understanding. Thus the farm home could have a theater of its own in the warm sitting-room while the soft snow covered the acres all about, hushing every disturbing sound.

Perhaps that lofty master of the dramatic art should not be the first one mentioned. It is quite easy to understand that some Country Girl will think this poet to be hard reading for one who has not had the chance to go through high school. For those who are timid about taking a bold leap into the field of more advanced literature there are many plays made from our present-day lives that are easy to read and to enact, plays adapted to any number of people, plays that may include father, mother, and the children down to the smallest; and there are many kinds of tableaux and smaller plays that can be represented on the lawn of the farmhouse or in the kitchen after the work is done.

Of course the greatest thing of all would be to make one's own plays out of one's own circ.u.mstances or out of the things that one is thinking about every day. In making a play one must first choose a hero or a heroine; then imagine something that this hero wishes to do. After that some great difficulty is to be planned that he must meet, some opposition he must overcome. In constructing a drama you tell the story of a struggle or endeavor of this kind, putting it all into the words the people speak and nothing at all into any account of the action, the gesture, or the dress. All those things must be seen to by the people who take the parts. And the background may be selected that will come nearest to being the right and fit one for the people and action suggested by the words of the play.

There is an infinite possibility before those who will make the attempt to let the playing of plays have part in the amus.e.m.e.nts in the farm home. All ages can be suited with plays, the simple ones for the smallest children, the more complex and finished for the older ones, the great ones for the oldest and most educated among the members of the family. As drama is one expression of the play spirit (using the word here in its meaning of "recreation"), and the satisfaction that comes with the feeding of this hunger in people of all ages, has but to be once known for us to seek earnestly for its food another and yet another time.

To show how this instinct has been made effective in one home I quote, with kind permission, a play made by one little girl of eleven years old. In reading it over the reader will see what the child has been reading and where she got the material of the thoughts she has embodied in the action and atmosphere of this nave and delightful little play.

TRUE LOVERS

A PLAY IN SEVEN SCENES

BY JULIA CAROLYN HORNE

THE CAST

KING ERIC Betsy Horne PRINCESS ELAINE, his daughter Harriet Benger SIR CONSTANTINE, knight, in love with PRINCESS ELAINE Julia Horne OMAR, a page Billie Horne Three ladies in waiting to Jessielyn Lucas, Helen Ecker, the Princess Helene Timmerman.

SCENE I.--COURT OF KING ERIC.

KING _seated on throne._ PRINCESS ELAINE _beside him, attended by her three maids of honor. A loud knocking is heard. Omar goes to the door and returns._

OMAR [_bowing low before throne_]--Your Majesty, a visitor has come.

KING--Bring him in.

[OMAR _ushers in a knight._]

SIR CONSTANTINE [_bowing low before the throne_]--Most n.o.ble King, I beg of you your daughter's hand in marriage.

KING [_stamps impatiently_]--No! Out of my royal presence at once!

KNIGHT--Farewell! Farewell!

[_Bows low and withdraws._]

PRINCESS ELAINE [_rising_]--Alas! Alas! It is so sad! Father, if ever thou carest for my happiness, grant him my hand.

[_Withdraws._]