Part 5

The world of idea is what you are seeking, no matter how sure you may be that you want realism. The power of a play comes from this, that it makes people believe that the action on the stage is not merely a story, which has happened and is over--but is a thing which is going on, a truth, a spiritual, inward reality which has to do with the life and sentiments of the audience. This is what we want, what we always want, whether we are playing Lear, or Ibsen, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The different kinds of drama use different means of suggesting spiritual reality. Poetic images are one way, sideboards and furniture are another way. Now it must be confessed at once that realism does tend to convey spiritual truth to people who possess a low degree of reflective power. A reproduction in detail of something seen in real life--wax-works, for instance--impresses the unimaginative person more strongly than a sketch of the same thing done by Rembrandt; yet both the wax-works and the Rembrandt have the same end in view--to bring home an idea to the beholder. We may, then, measure the life in people’s fancy by the weight of suggestion which is requisite to awaken them--a feather of imagery or a cannon ball of actuality--and in this we shall not be dealing with several kinds of dramatic principle, but only with several conditions of education in the audience.

The recent realism seen on our own stage shows a deadness of wit in our life--the sad unresponsive seriousness of persons who do not habitually live in the world of imagination. That world seems flat to them. Nevertheless, the same persons will, with a little encouragement, begin to enjoy humor, and trust poetry. Put them where they have no critical responsibility and they will blossom into enjoyment. O blessed amateurs! I wish someone would write a book and show that the whole history of art has been but the history of amateurs; and that every revival of painting, drama, music, architecture, and poetry has been due to them. They cannot, perhaps, make great music themselves, but they hand the lyre to Apollo. They have not the training, but they have the passion that finds talent in others and protects the flame while it is young. They suspect the secret of a lost art and go in search of it as for the Golden Fleece. And amateurs, yes the amateurs are the persons who will keep the drama from ever quite losing all relation to its ancestor--its good genius--the charade.

The great aim of any drama is to make all the audience and all the actors think of the same thing at the same moment during the entire evening. The “argument,” as they used to call it, is the main thing. It is astonishing what a good name this is for the exposition of ideas that takes place in a very good play either ancient or modern. The argument is what both audience and actors breathlessly follow. We err only when we begin to define what the argument is. It seems, in truth, to be something too subtle for analysis. In some plays we think we find it in the plot, in others in the characters, in others in the language, and so forth. But there is hardly a definition of it which some famous example will not instantly confute. There is, for instance, a charm that comes out of As You Like It, and which for three hundred years has made audiences consent to sit through its three hours of happy trifling. That charm is the “argument” of As You Like It. You cannot state the charm. It is as subtle as the ether and as real as the power of light that moves across the ether. Our senses are not at fault, but only our theories. There is a fluctuating mystery about all that happens in the theatre, and perhaps this indefinable power is what most attaches us to the place. It is not a place of learning, nor of scholarship, nor of information or ethics, nor even of such flights of mind as accurate thought can always follow. It is a place of enchantment.

NORWAY.

In Norway people live in small houses in which the air is very bad. The people neither wash nor laugh, and common sense is unknown among them. Each man or woman is endowed with one idea, and that is sufficient for each. He is satisfied with it, and he is never seen without it. So that anyone may always very easily recognize the different characters of a Norwegian play. One knows that each idea is very significant, very logical, and very much to be noted. Thus, if a character has the idea of walking upstairs backward instead of forward, one feels perfectly satisfied about that person. He is always talking about his mania, and one knows that, in the end, some terrible and logical calamity is going to result from the perverse habit with which stepdame nature has endowed him. For all people in Norway are stepchildren of nature, and are barely endowed with sufficient complexity of intelligence to prevent them from swallowing poison, falling down wells, or walking over precipices. Indeed they do all these things, the moment the well or the poison or the precipice comes between themselves and their favorite hobby.

I saw a very nice play the other day about these people. If was about a very nice elderly man and his elderly sister, Jake Borg and Elisa Borg. Jake loved his sister, and his sister loved her cat--a Maltese cat of the largest variety. Both Jake and Elisa spent an hour or so each day in talking about the cat, and of how dangerous it was for the cat to insist upon walking on the back fence during the very hours when Jake was practising with his flint-lock at a target erected upon the fence. Jake, it appears, was a member of the village patriotic shooting society and was the president of it, and his whole heart and soul were wrapped up in it. The society used flint-locks rather than percussion caps because the time occupied by the explosion, being quite long with flint-locks, the nerves of the patriots would be the better steeled to bear the noise. Thus, during the forenoon, for several years, the devoted couple discussed the question whether or not the pet cat would be hit by the pet bullets; and it became alarmingly evident that such would be the case, unless one or the other of the afflicted persons should desist from the practice of his hobby. There were various other people who came in to help the principal characters in the play to discuss the peril. Neither party in the great conflict would budge from his principle--the one, for patriotic reasons, the other out of Christian piety and affection for dumb animals.

The anguish of the situation became so intense that it was almost a relief when the cat was shot by the heroic burgher in the very shot by which he completed a hundred consecutive bull’s-eyes--or would have completed them, but for the fated animal. Jake’s life was ruined by this failure; as Elisa’s was ruined by the loss of her companion, and the village life was ruined because there remained nothing to talk about thereafter. So, all the inhabitants of that Norwegian hamlet shut their windows tight, and continued each in the pursuit of his own serious hobby, neither washing, nor smiling, nor making allowance for the hobbies of the rest, but only grinding out remorsely the magnificent tragic material of Norwegian life.

DR. HOWE.

There are men who have great fame during their lives, and then disappear forever; and there are others who live unknown to their contemporaries, and then emerge upon posterity, and cast back a perpetual reproach upon their own times which were not worthy of them. To neither of these classes does Dr. Howe belong; for he was a hero in his own day, and has left behind him so many memorials of his mind and times that he can never become wholly lost to the world. He belongs rather to that class of reappearing reputations which die through successive resurrections, and distribute their message to humanity through many undulations of loss and rediscovery.

One cannot tell where to set the boundary to such men’s influence, for while the student writes, the shadow moves. The scribbler who is assigning values and labels to history becomes an instrument in the hands of his subject, and something is accomplished through him which is beyond his own horizon. This is the mechanism through which great men reach the world. The present age has all but forgotten Dr. Howe: his name has for some years been on the road to oblivion. For I do not count as fame the dusty memorials and busts of dead philanthropists which adorn and disfigure college libraries. Their honored and obliterated features carry something, but it is not fame. They are like neglected finger-boards which have fallen by the wayside and are calmly undergoing unimaginable dissolution through the soft handling of the elements. Wordsworth might have addressed a sonnet to these men had he not been so preoccupied with external nature. “Behold, this man was once the sign-board of classical learning, this of electricity, this of natural science.” But Wordsworth would have been obliged first to rub the moss from the inscriptions.

Some years ago it looked as if Dr. Howe, the great and famous Dr. Howe, had fallen by the wayside of progress and was to remain forever a dead finger-post and a reminiscence in the history of the world’s care for the blind. To-day a new image of him is beginning to form above the mass of letters, documents, and written reports which his busy life bequeathed to the garret, and in which his daughter, Laura E. Richards, has recently quarried for a book of memoirs. She has produced two large volumes which give us Dr. Howe from the intimate side of his character, and in a way that no man can be publicly known to his contemporaries. It is of this new image or _vita nuova_ of Dr. Howe that I mean to speak.

There is a variety of interest in his life, which shatters the picture of a philanthropist and leaves in its place the picture of an adventurer--an unselfish adventurer; that is to say, a sort of Theseus or Hercules, an unaccountable person who visits this world from somewhere else. After all, this is the impression he made upon his own times. Perhaps we are getting a breeze of the same wind that blew through him in life: I cannot tell. At any rate, it was not to Laura Bridgman only that Howe was sent into the world. I confess to a feeling that he was one of the greatest of Americans and one of the best men who ever lived.

Seventy years ago his name was known to everybody in the civilized world. The part he took in the Greek Revolution (1825-29) had made him famous while still a very young man, and his success in teaching the blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, (1837-41) seemed at the time, and still seems, one of the great triumphs in the history of human intellect. The world rang with it. The miracle was done in the sight of all men, and humanity stood on the benches and shouted themselves blind with applause. This accomplishment, which was the great accomplishment of his life, will always remain Dr. Howe’s trade-mark and proverbial significance; but other parts of his life almost equal it in permanent value. The historical interest of the Greek Revolution, and of the latter half of the anti-slavery period, are supplemented by the scientific interest of all Dr. Howe’s philanthropic work and by the personal interest of an extraordinary and unique character.

Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston in 1801, and was thus just twenty years old when the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. In that year he was graduated at Brown University, Providence, and thereafter studied medicine for three years in Boston. Byron’s poems had prepared the youths of Europe and of America for the Greek struggle, and Howe was one of the young men who responded in person to Byron’s final call to arms. Howe did not reach Greece till a few months after Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824. Howe spent six years in campaigning with the Greek patriots. He had enlisted in the capacity of a surgeon; but the exigencies of the primitive and very severe guerilla warfare tended to obliterate official rank and to throw the work upon those who had executive ability. The war was a scramble of patriot banditti and peasant militia against Mahommetan ruffians. The name of Greece, the name of Byron, the beauty of the scenery in whose midst the war proceeded, the heart-rending nature of the struggle and its happy outcome, all combine to make this the most romantic war in history. It was one of the last wars before that effective development of steam and gunpowder which have forever merged the picturesque in the horrible.

The young Howe kept a journal, which shows a character entirely at one with his rapturously poetic surroundings. Before I had read this journal I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man of this type, the seventeenth century navigator, whose daily life is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of Robinson Crusoe.--“Passed a pirate boat, but he saw too many marks of preparation about us to attack us; in fact, if vessels only knew what cowards these pirates are they would never be robbed, for the least resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high sides, two light guns and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off every vessel which approaches. The pirates always come in long, light, open boats which pull from sixteen to thirty-six and forty oars. They sometimes have a gun, and always select calm weather to attack. But how to get up the sides of a vessel if twelve men with cutlasses were to oppose them.”...

“But it was a great fault on the part of commanders of vessels of war not to have made examples. A few bodies hanging at their yard-arms, and displayed round among the islands, would have had more effect than all they have done.”...

There we have the reality of which Stevenson’s tales are the reflection and the traditional imitation. Again--“If he challenges, I shall have my choice of weapons. I am pretty good master of the small sword, and think I could contrive to disarm him and make him beg on his knees, for I am sure he is one of the most arrant cowards.”... Again--“They passed along the beach at full gallop not far from us, and I gave them a rifle ball which missed them.”... In another place--“But one of them held his head out long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall. Said I ‘A moment more and I may fall in the same way.’”...

On another occasion--“I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel.”... It must be remembered that inasmuch as Howe was a surgeon he had no right to be fighting at all; but dear me! we are on the Spanish main in Elizabeth’s time; and, as Howe observed a few days later, “I had been directed to keep below, but the scene was too interesting for a young man to lose sight of.”...

There was a touch of the buccaneer about Howe. His slight tendency toward lawlessness kept cropping out all through his life. It appears in an assault which he made on a sentinel at Rome in 1844, and in all his anti-slavery work--of which later. A great descriptive power is revealed in this journal, which he kept during the months when he often slept with his head on a stone and subsisted on fried wasps. As an example of vivid sketching take the following:

“On the road I had met bodies of peasantry of the lower class called Vlachoi (Wallachians), driving before them all their little stock, perhaps a few dozen sheep, as many goats, a donkey and a half-dozen fowls, all guarded by a pair of fine-looking mountain dogs and followed by the father lugging his rough capote, with gun in hand and an old pistol and knife in his belt, and the mother with her baby lashed to her back in a bread-trough, a kettle on her head, and sundry articles of furniture in her hands. A troop of dirty ragged boys and girls, brought up the rear, each bearing a load of baggage proportionate to their strength, a little donkey carrying all the rest of the furniture and farming tools, in fine, all their goods and chattels. Land they have none; they feed their flocks on the high mountains in summer, and now on the approach of winter they descend to the warmer valleys, where they build a wigwam and pass the winter.”... Sieges and battles on land and sea, assassinations and conspiracies, pictures of natural scenery and domestic life, of happiness, pathos, humor, heroism,--the diaries abound in all such things; and the pictures often burn and glow and sparkle. I cannot tell whether this sparkle is a literary quality, or a ray from Howe’s character, or an illusion of my own. But certainly, something remarkable appears in the step and carriage of the young man. He does not stay in the book, he walks into the room where you are reading. The substance and setting of these Greek journals at times remind us of George Borrow’s books; but Howe’s writing is done without literary intention and therefore speaks from a more unusual depth. No time has been spent over these jottings, the recorder is hardly more responsible for them than the pen that writes them down. The scenes have whirled themselves upon the paper. Howe was always somewhat wanting in the reverence for letters which obtains in Boston. He regarded himself as inferior in literary attainment to several of his friends. He had, however, the descriptive power sometimes found in condottieri. It is the thrilling stuff they deal in that endows these men with such talent. I cannot forbear transcribing a passage from a very different style of adventurer, Trelawney. It does not concern Howe directly; but it may serve as a sample page from the Greek revolutionary period. The passage is quoted by Sanborn in his Life of Howe.

“On our way from Argos to Corinth, in 1823, we passed through the defiles of Dervenakia; our road was a mere mule-path for about two leagues, winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged precipices. In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large Ottoman force, principally cavalry, had been stopped in the previous autumn, by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves of cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect picture of the war, and told its own story; the sagacity of the nimble-footed Greeks and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish commanders were palpable. Detached from the heaps of dead we saw the skeletons of some bold riders, who had attempted to scale the acclivities, still astride the skeletons of their horses, and in the rear, as if in the attempt to back out of the fray, the bleached bones of the negroes’ hands still holding the hair ropes attached to the skulls of the camels--death, like sleep, is a strange posture-master. There were grouped in a narrow space 5,000 or more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mules; vultures had eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their bones.”... Is not this picture worthy of the prophet Ezekiel? It was among such scenes as this that the Greek Revolution went forward.

In 1827-8 Dr. Howe concluded that the best service he could render the Greeks was to go to America and procure help. He came to America, and went about holding public meetings and pleading for the starving Greeks. Great enthusiasm was excited, and money, food, and clothing was generously contributed. Howe took charge of a vessel laden with provisions and clothing, and hastening back to Greece, arrived in time to prevent thousands from starving. “These American contributions,” he says, “went directly to the people; and their effect was very great, not only by relieving from hunger and cold, but by inspiring courage and hope. I made several depots in different places; I freighted small vessels and ran up the bays with them. The people came trooping from their hiding places, men, women, children, hungry, cold, ragged and dirty. They received rations of flour, corn, biscuit, pork, etc., and were clad in the warm garments made up by American women. It was one of the happiest sights a man could witness; one of the happiest agencies he could discharge. They came, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles, on foot, to get rations and clothing. Several vessels followed mine and distributions were made.

“An immense number of families from Attica, from Psara, and from other Islands, had taken refuge in Ægina, and there was the most concentrated suffering. I established a main depot there, and commenced a systematic distribution of the provisions and clothing. As the Greeks were all idle, I concluded it was not best to give alms except to the feeble; but I commenced a public work on which men, women, and children could be occupied. The harbor of Ægina was not a natural one, but the work of the old Greeks. The long walls projecting into the sea for breakwaters were in pretty good condition, but the land side of the harbor was nearly ruined from being filled up with débris and washings from the town.

“I got some men who had a little ‘gumption’ and built a coffer-dam across the inner side of the harbor. Then we bailed out the water, and, digging down to get a foundation, laid a solid wall, which made a beautiful and substantial quay, which stands to this day, and is called the American Molos or Mole. In this work as many as five hundred people, men, women, and children, ordinarily worked; on some days as many as seven hundred, I think.”...

Encouraged by the success of his mole, Dr. Howe determined upon a more ambitious venture.--“I applied to the government, and obtained a large tract of land upon the Isthmus of Corinth, where I founded a colony of exiles. We put up cottages, procured seed, cattle, and tools, and the foundations of a flourishing village were laid. Capo d’Istria had encouraged me in the plan of the colony, and made some promises of help. The government granted ten thousand ‘stremmata’ of land to be free from taxes for five years; but they could not give much practical help. I was obliged to do everything, and had only the supplies sent out by the American committees to aid me. The colonists, however, coöperated, and everything went on finely. We got cattle and tools, ploughed and prepared the earth, got up a school-house and a church.

“Everything went on finely, and we extended our domain over to the neighboring port of Cenchraea, where we had cultivated ground and a harbor. This was perhaps the happiest part of my life. I was alone among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help them, and they let me have my own way. I had one civilized companion for awhile, David Urquhart, the eccentric Englishman, afterward M. P. and pamphleteer. I had to journey much to and from Corinth, Napoli, etc., always on horseback, or in boat, and often by night. It was a time and place where law was not; and sometimes we had to defend ourselves against armed and desperate stragglers from the bands of soldiers now breaking up. We had many ‘scrimmages,’ and I had several narrow escapes with life.

“In one affair Urquhart showed extraordinary pluck and courage, actually disarming and taking prisoner two robbers, and marching them before him into the village. I labored here day and night, in season and out, and was governor, clerk, constable, and everything but _patriarch_; for, though I was young, I took to no maiden, nor ever thought about womankind but once. The government (or rather, Capo d’Istria, the president) treated the matter liberally--for a Greek--and did what he could to help me.”...