Part 11

"No," the man shouted, "no clothing to-day, and you'll never sell anything if this is the way you'll attend to your business." It was the proprietor of the store. For a moment the puller-in seemed dazed. Then he shoved his "Zukunft" into his coat pocket. He began to cast his eyes about for customers. He looked a model of sorrow. I was told that it was his idealism, his striving for the impossible, beautiful, that reduced him to the ugly position he was in. We moved on. There were other men reading, if only in snatches, but they apparently owned their stores and had their assistants. One of the pullers pointed out to me is one of the most enthusiastic Zionists in this city. Children were playing on sidewalks and doorsteps, sedately but happily. A school-teacher from one of the neighboring institutions passed through the street. Several little girls recognized and flocked about her. One took the teacher's umbrella, the other asked for the privilege of carrying the young lady's Boston bag. They took hold of her arms and went along dancing and smiling as she talked to them. Above the rumbling of wagons were heard the pleasing notes of a piano and the singing of a sweet-voiced daughter of the tenements.

Farther up the street was more crowded. It was Thursday afternoon. The stores were all activity and bustle, and the pedlers with their wagons and pushcarts were crying their foods and wares for "the Holy Sabbath" in quaint and singing Yiddish phrases. I was reminded by my friend that Abraham Goldfoden, the father of the Jewish stage, in one of his operettas uses a swarming, eve-of-Sabbath market-scene like this very effectively, and makes his hucksters sing beautifully of the things they have to sell. Said my guide: "Of course, in the operetta of 'The Witch' the pedlers are not so ragged and besmeared, and you cannot hear the smell of the meat and the fish, but neither can you buy and eat these things. After all, if art is beautiful, real life is quite useful.

"To our people," said Keidansky, casting his eyes about, "everything here is a matter of course, and there is nothing unusual about it all. The strangest things are the strangers, who come to stare, study and wonder. In fact, the self-concentration of the Jew, probably the secret of his survival, makes this the only place in the world, the temporary Palestine, the centre of the universe. There are other places in this city, but they are only the outskirts, the suburbs of the Ghetto. There are other peoples and religions, but we are the people and ours is the faith. The flattery that children receive from their parents afterwards helps them to bear the brunt of the battle. The consciousness of his being chosen helped Israel to find his way through the dark labyrinth of the centuries. Everything here is as it should be, only a little more on the exclusive and pious European plan. This is more of the old fashioned view, but it is still extant, inasmuch as the Ghetto remains."

Now we were near Bersowsky's book-store which was on the other side of the street and we stopped, facing it. A street-organ was playing in front of the strange emporium and a band of children were dancing gayly to its music. We could see the books and periodicals, phylacteries and newspapers, holy fringe-garments and sheets of Jewish music in the windows from the other side of the street. And as we came nearer we could see the very aged woman, bewigged and kerchiefed, wan, wrinkled and wry--the most familiar figure in the Ghetto--we could see her sitting on her high stool, drinking a glass of tea and selling newspapers. There were several simple prints and chromos in the window, reproductions from pictures of Jewish life. Parents blessing their children on the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Passover, high priests lighting the candles in the temple--these were their subjects. In the windows were also brass candlesticks, such as are being lighted and blessed on the eve of each Sabbath. We stood outside and mused.

"This," Keidansky explained, "is the leading Jewish book-store in Boston, and it is in a sense also the spiritual centre of this Ghetto. If any one were to ask me what is to-day the moral condition of the Jews, their spiritual state, what are their intellectual status and religious aspirations, if any one should ask me--I would take them into this store and let them see what it contains. Religion, history, literature--it is all in here--at least in all its physical manifestations. Pentateuchs, Bibles, prayer-books, all books of religious instruction, books of piety and penance, volumes of the Talmud and of Mishna, phylacteries and holy scrolls, covers for the scrolls and curtains for the Holy Ark, ram's horns to sound on New Year's, knives wherewith to kill cattle according to a merciful ritual, candle-sticks and show-threads which the Jews were commanded to wear at the bottom of their garments (and some of them now wear under their garments)--in a word, all that stands to preserve the old faith is here. All the symbolism of our old faith is here incarnated. And yet side by side with these are the things which tend towards the transformation or dissolution of the ancient religion--the publications of the radicals, the destroying utterances of the revolutionists. Here come the orthodox for prayer-books and the anti-religious for free-thought pamphlets. Here you find the organs of the patriots and Zionists, who wish to preserve and regenerate the Jewish people, and also the organs of the Socialists and Anarchists who are fighting against all national ideas and for an assimilated humanity. Come in and I'll show you. There is the 'Zukunft' (Future), the best literary and scientific monthly we ever had, which is published by the Socialists. It was formerly edited by Abe Cahan, now Dr. Caspe has charge of it. And look! 'Die Freie Arbeiter Stimme,' the Anarchist weekly, ably edited by S. Yanofsky, one of the cleverest Yiddish writers.

"And," my friend whispered, "this old lady, who stands for all that is pious and ancient, handing out the 'Freie Arbeiter Stimme' and the Socialist 'Vorwärts,' is to me as strongly dramatic and as profoundly symbolic a picture as any thing in life and literature. Mr. Bersowsky, who started this store, now sells books, it is hoped, in a better world. Look at this young old woman--his widow--and see if hearts ever break around here. The aged lady is his mother, and she would not be in any other place in the world, except where her husband, and afterwards her son spent their last days. So she stays here all the time the store is open, and sells papers and books in spite of protests.

"The Jew is so practical that he always looks ahead; he is chronically optimistic, and his imagination creates everything that the world denies him. Dreamer he has been ever since the prophets, and even before their time. It must have been superb idealism and beautiful faith which enabled him to loan money to his neighbors during the Middle Ages. It still requires fine imagination to do it to-day.

"Between the sordid and the sublime stands the Jew, who is either one or the other, or both, as circumstances shape his destiny. You can see this in all his literature, from the stories of Motke Chabad to the plays of Jacob Gordin.

"Is it not strange how quickly we adapt ourselves, and how soon we come up to date and ahead of date? But yesterday we had no literature except our religious guides, our only beacon lights in the old-world Ghettos; and now we have splendid modern works, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, all breathing the modern spirit. Many standard works from all European tongues have been translated for us; but we have a number of great masters of our own. It is such a short time ago that we had no fiction to speak of us (except the sermons of our preachers); and now there is Abromowitz and Peretz, Spector and Rubenowitz, and so many others. There is a whole group of modern poets, who have also grown up in no time. And the struggle between the old and the new, which this literature represents, the striving for the modern, and the longing for the ancient--that is what makes it so painful and pleasant--so stirring, and therefore such good art. All grades of feeling and believing, thinking and non-thinking, are in the books and periodicals that you find in this store. And the men and women who come here, living in the same Ghetto, are often millions of miles apart in their ideas."

My guide asked for his book, a Hebrew story, by L. M. Lillenblum. The elderly man, who is a relative of the family and a partner in the business, knew all about it, found it after a long search, and made my friend happy. The story, I was told, was written about twenty years ago by a native of Keidan. At that time there was a general literary awakening, and many talented men wrote profane and useful books in the holy language, and shocked the orthodox Jews of Russia. In Keidan, they wanted to excommunicate the author of "The Follies of My Youth"; but the rabbi of Kovno telegraphed, saying that the infidel was a great man, and should be left alone--with his book. An old man came in, and after much bargaining, bought a silk praying-shawl. Several persons came in for papers. A young man bought the "Zukunft" and "The Merchant of Venice" translated in blank verse, by Joseph Bovshover.

He wore glasses, long hair, carried an umbrella and a green bag; in fact, one might have met him in a vegetarian restaurant. He was pointed out to me as a noted radical, a dreamer, who writes for the "Vorwärts," works as a tailor in a sweat-shop, and is said to be writing a book. A comely young maiden, with a madonna-like face, came near the store. She had a few mayflowers in her hand--and gave them to a ragged little child standing there. She came in and bought a paper. She did not read Yiddish; but it was for her father. She was a college student, I was told, of advanced ideas, but deeply in love with the people of the Ghetto and their beliefs--was planning to devote her life to settlements and social reform work--one of the many dreamers who came into this store.

"Once," said my guide, "I told her that I would put her into a book. 'Thank you,' she answered. 'I don't want to sink into oblivion so soon.' But she is an idyl of the Ghetto just the same. Look; here are the poems of David Edelstaat. He sleeps now in a lonely grave in the Jewish cemetery at Denver, Colorado, by the side of the fence, for he was a delinquent in Israel. He went there by way of the corroding sweat-shop and a damp cellar in New York, where he edited a little communist weekly. Many of our idealists go to Denver this way. It is the only time they travel and take a vacation. The hospitals there are crowded. But Edelstaat's poems, they are a sacred treasure among the Jewish working people."

XX

The Purpose of Immoral Plays

The smoke was so thick and the din so heavy, that I did not see him when I came in and barely heard his shouted greeting. Such was the crowded condition of the regular resort on Saturday night; yet I found Keidansky tucked up in a corner of the café, "oblivious to the obvious," around him, with a pile of newspapers in his hands. "The group" had not as yet assembled, so my friend was reading.

"This has been a great week," he said with gladsome emphasis, after we had exchanged courtesies. I at once suspected what he meant.

"A great week," I said, "because you have been able to see humanity piteously dissected, human beings mercilessly analyzed, souls stript of their raiment, wounded and bleeding, our fellow-men on exhibition, crippled by custom and walking on the crutches of convention, our best arrangements of life held up to ridicule and scorn. A great week," I said, "because you have fed on tragedy like a fiend?"

"Yes, there is something sad about tragedy," answered Keidansky, ignoring my bitterness, "but the man who sees things clearly, who looks a long distance behind the scenes, the man who sees the worst and does not die, but lives to cast his observations into a perfect work, and to lift you up to the mountain-top with him, is not this man great and gladdening? Is there not cause for exultation in a really big tragedy? And this is saying but little about the æsthetic pleasure of a story told in heart-breaking and soul-stirring manner," he added. "Some one must do this work, and it makes one feel real good when the right man comes along.

"The saddest stories are yet to be told, before there can be much more happiness in the world. We can never reach the heights until we realize the depths. As for myself, I give all the world to the man who can make it better than it is. And such works are making the longed-for improvement, by performing the miracle of making men and women think, doing this, not by any pedantic preachments, but by the power of suggestiveness and the large vision of the newer and truer art. Art with a purpose? But all art has this purpose. And the less the purpose is consciously inculcated into art, the better is that purpose carried out. They call them problem plays, but was there ever a great play without some sort of problem in it? Without some burning question of life, and love, and death? What's that? Immoral? Was there ever a masterly and mastering work that was not immoral, according to the popular judgments? Was there ever a work with a big purpose that conformed to the critics and to current lack of opinions? Could there be much of a purpose to anything that did not shock the world's conspiracy of cowardice they call morality? _Gott ist mit dir!_ You must go abroad and take some cure. You have been reading the American dramatic critics. It was a great week, I say, with Ibsen and Björnson, Sudermann and Pinero, and two wonderful artists to interpret them, but the pleasure was very much spoiled for me by some of these critics. Ah, these poor critics. Here are the papers, and I can still hear them choking and croaking and cackling, and my heart goes out to them and turns sick. What a wonderful lot of fellows they are. What endless platitudes and empty phrases--full of nonsense--they have delivered themselves of this week, yet I don't think they are any the wiser for it. I know one of the fraternity (there is sufficient disagreement between themselves to be called a fraternity) who is a perfect genius. With one stroke of his mighty pen he once annihilated Ibsen, Echegaray, Astrowsky, Paul Hervieue and Edward Martyn. It was all 'morbid trash,' he said of a series of their plays, and it is strange that these men are still heard of occasionally. That was after the John Blair experiment, and I walked into this critic's office and made a few extemporaneous remarks. He said I ought to have more respect for a man who can get as much advertising for his paper as he can. Of course, this was indisputable. It would take so little courage to do it, yet they dare not think their own thoughts, the dear, dear critics. No, there is not any use in trying to reason with them, but I sometimes would like to get them all together in one room and give them all a sound horsewhipping.

"One of the critics, who writes in silk gloves, swears in the most perfect, correct English, and compares every play he sees to something of Shakespeare, objects to 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' as an immoral play. The dissection of this woman's heart and mind, he protests, is not the proper business of the dramatist, nor is the inspection of his dissecting table after the job has been done a proper amusement for theatrical spectators. 'A process of repentance and purification' and that sort of thing, on the part of this unfortunate, must be indicated, if art is to approach this kind of life. The entire scheme of ethics is bad. Yet the critic admits that the performance was terrible and touching, and that Mrs. Campbell--Heaven bless her for coming to see us--won a remarkable and complete victory in the part; altogether he praises her very generously.

"Now, what I say is this. If we can be moved and stirred by an immoral play, there is either something the matter with our morality, or there is something radically wrong with our hearts. I must recall to you the lines of Stephen Crane. 'Behold the grave of a wicked man, and near is a stern spirit. There came a drooping maid with violets, but the spirit grasped her arm. "No flowers for him," he said. The maid wept: "Oh, I loved him." But the spirit grim and frowning: "No flowers for him."

"Now, this is it. 'If the spirit was just, why did the maid weep?' If our standard of morality is right, why do our hearts go out for Paula Tanqueray, for Nora Helmer, for Mad Agnes? Is it because we have become so humane as to be far ahead of our morality? What does it mean, anyway? We are told that the contents of the plays seen here last week, are not fit subjects for the drama. Well, art might as well go out of business, if it is not going to look life squarely in the face, if it is not going to sound the very depths of things, and mirror conditions as they are to-day, for modern humanity. The play in particular, it is clear, must deal with the intense efforts, the dramatic essences of life; the play in particular will have nothing to do unless it takes up the crucial conditions, the large realities, the stirring struggles, the sterling aspirations of the clashing life of to-day under the new and as yet unadjusted surroundings. The drama must take up shame and crime, error and suffering, or there is no plot for a great play anywhere. The few pretty, romantic, silly stories have been told over and over again. Now we have grown. There is a larger life before us, and we want something stronger. We must have plays to educate our critics,--if that is possible.

"'He who is without sin among ye, let him cast the first stone.' If Christ had said nothing else, would not this have made him a great man? Yet after eighteen hundred years it is necessary for another Jew, a Portuguese Jew named Pinero, to say the same thing through the medium of a play, because the Christians say that Christ's teachings are immoral. And then the stones of the critics are thrown at Pinero."

Here I said something about the relation between art and morality, but Keidansky protested.

"Art has nothing to do with morality," he said, "and therefore it teaches such great moral lessons. It re-creates and reproduces Nature and life in forms of beauty and power. And because it approaches elementary conditions without bias and preconceived notions, and illumines its material with the touch of human genius, it shows us life in its largeness, right in its relativeness, and raises us above our established moralities. Because art is the spontaneous expression of the humane, the true, the good and the beautiful in our souls, it helps us to see the larger rights, the greater justice, and helps us to make, change and advance our morality. Art touches the commonplace and makes it divine. It makes a saint out of a sinner by showing causes, and casting a kindly light over human weakness.

"In real life 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' is a shameful scandal, to be exploited by sensational newspapers, and we avoid the parties concerned and run away from them; but art raises the story to the height of the tragic and the epic, and we suffer and grieve with Paula, and even the cold critic, who tries so hard not to be humane, is moved. In life we are even afraid to mention the names of such people; but art makes us weep for Camille, sympathize with Sapho, be sad, or gay, with the vagabond François Villon, sigh for Denise, grieve with Don José, and follow Manon Lescaut through the desert of North America. Art helps us to realize that there is no sin but error, no degradation but dulness of the mind, no vice but lack of vision.

"I don't want to speak to you because you did not go to see Björnson's 'Beyond Human Power' and Mrs. Campbell's acting in that piece. Yet since you did not go you ought to be enlightened. You have read the story? Did you see how the critics dodged the issues of the play, beating about the bush and puzzling each other? A case of faith and reason, you know, and you mustn't talk about these things. A blind leader of the blind, a man who 'lacks the sense of reality' and sees only what he wishes to see; a woman of intellect who wastes her love on him; unbelieving children of a miracle worker; the clash between the new and the old; the decrepitude of orthodoxy; the contrast between the master and his disciples and who can never realize the impossible, unnatural ideals; the faith that kills. The play has all the tragedy of a dying religion, and the last act is as powerful as anything I have ever seen anywhere. What does it mean? To me it indicates the dying of the old Christianity, and I believe that Björnson, unlike Ibsen, is a Christian. The quiet, subdued, subtle work of Mrs. Campbell was worthy of the play.

"And there was Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House.' I shall never forget the performance of it. What a simple story, how concise and terse, not a superfluous word in the whole of it, yet how strong and stirring! It is primarily a picture, a powerful dramatic picture without a shadow of preachiness in it. You say there is a problem in it? Yes, but it's in the picture, the picture is the problem. Here is a perfect work of a great master, if there ever was one. There are whole cities made up of such dolls' houses, with women as playthings, toys, means of amusement, slaves of conventionality and of slavish men, yet the critics are croaking and raising the cry of 'immorality.' Save on the New York East Side Ghetto, Ibsen is comparatively unknown in America, but it is not true that the American people are not interested in his plays whenever they are given and that they would not go to see them if more of them were performed. In saying so the critics say what is not true, as was manifest from the enthusiastic audiences at the last week's performances. There is a Yiddish translation of the play by the poet Morris Winchewsky, and it was performed by Mr. and Mrs. Jacob P. Adler, but I have never seen it. Mrs. Fiske's 'Nora' is positively great. Her delicacy, her mastery of light and shade, her manner of speech and poise, and on the whole her perfect conception of the character is a stroke of genius. Why did you not see it? Do you want to go? You can pay for my lunch. Ibsen and Björnson have impoverished me this week."

"So you don't think much of the American critics?" I asked at this point.

"On the contrary," he said, "with the exception of some, I think they are all good advertising agents."

XXI

The Poet and the Problem

This time I met Keidansky in front of the Jewish theatre. He had just left the rehearsal of a play which he had translated from the German into Yiddish. As I approached he pointed to a huge sign on top of the building across the street advertising, in a pretty jingle of rhymes, a new biscuit of undreamed of deliciousness.

"I have solved the problem," he said proudly. This was not such a surprise to me. To solve problems was my friend's business.

"What problem is that?" I asked.

"The problem of the poet," he answered. "After the ages of oppression, persecution and poverty, after the exiles, insults and negligence of centuries, the poet will at last come into his own, into bread and butter and a respected position in society. Immunity from starvation, peace, prosperity will at last be his. His worth will be recognized and he will be put to work and made a useful member of society."

"What will he do?" I asked.