Part 8

As a person, Zona Gale is thoroughly entertaining in two distinct moods. At one moment she speaks with the accents of “Pollyanna”, the next with those of her own “Grandma Bett”. She is slight, delicate, pretty, shy but firm. She is quiet in her gestures and her voice is soft. She will allow herself the great pleasure of an emotional experience such as helping a crippled boy to write, and finding in him something which is, presumably, quite beyond his actual talents. Yet she has a dry, detached manner of viewing life. While she has forced herself to believe that life is sweet and beautiful, her work often shows that she knows better than that. She was born in Portage, Wisconsin, and she has lived there most of her life, except while she was at the University of Wisconsin, and in New York City working on a newspaper. She is eager, ambitious, sympathetic. She has the ability to dramatize the optimistic side of events. She is the type that champions pacifism avidly and has principles about kindness to animals. She worked night and day in New York until she had succeeded in gaining the attention of various editors for her poems and short stories. She then returned to Wisconsin, where she remains. Occasionally she arrives suddenly in town, sees her friends, produces a play (there are two waiting in the Broadway offing now), indulges in a round of gaieties, then turns again to the native state and her charming mother. Her earlier books betrayed her most sentimental mood. “Miss Lulu Bett” and “Birth” show her at her truest. Perhaps she has been too cloistered ever to go beyond mild cynicism and surface realism. When she characterizes, she rings true, but when her characters require great emotional experience she finds herself at a loss. A writer of distinction, she has yet reached no stable ground. She is an artist only in part. Perhaps she is too much the woman to be the uncompromising craftsman.

THE NEW WORD IN PLAY PRODUCING

Producing a play seems to me, as I have recently watched it, to be partly the art of dealing with people. And the new word in dealing with people is to deal with them, not to direct them.

Watching Mr. Brock Pemberton staging my play, I used to think that if one of the oldtime producers were to enter the theatre, he would say: “But this man is not doing anything. He just sits there.” It was true that he seemed just to sit there, hour after hour. The director of my fears, he who stood tense or wild in the midst of the players and cried that fire from heaven had fallen on such and such a reading, or bit of business, or tempo--he was not in the theatre. Soon he will not be in any theatre. Or in any other creative work. Which means almost all work.

Instead there was, in this case, a man who sat in the house, halfway back, and who at first said principally: “From the beginning, please.” Or, “Once more, that scene.” And very often: “Come now. Let’s all help.” There also was I who in those first days kept saying to him: “Don’t you think that should be read so and so?” or “That oughn’t to be done so, just there” or “That isn’t the right reading.” And the invariable reply would be: “Let’s let them get the lines first.” “Let’s see if they won’t come to that in a day or two.” In the first weeks of rehearsal I must have said these things literal scores of times and always to that same reply, delivered without impatience and without a shadow of turning.

Gradually, in instance after instance, it was clear that the suggestion which I had been so eager to make was either finding its way into the reading by the feeling of the actors, or was being supplanted by something of their own creation that was better. When I spoke of this--“It means so much more when they find out a thing for themselves,” the producer said.

After a time, at the close of a rehearsal, he would go down to the front row and say: “I have a few notations--will you take them down?” He would make innumerable suggestions, and the company would note them on their parts. When a member of the company asked how a line should be read the first reply from the producer was usually: “How do you feel that line--what do you feel is the most natural reading?” Again and again he asked them for suggestions. If a line needed something and I could not make the suggestion, he would ask the one to whom it belonged to try to think of the thing he would like to say in such a situation. Some of the least unsatisfactory lines, therefore, came from the company themselves.

Often it seemed to me that the producer thought of himself as one of the company. And as if industrial difficulties might be solved if only all the coöperators in industry could recognize themselves in this way. That which Walter Hampden welcomes as “industrial and artistic coöperation” was assuredly here. It is the new word in industry as in art--the third word, the human factor. Yet in the end this play was shot through from first to last with the ideal of naturalism which all along had been the ideal of the producer--but he had developed it, he had not stamped it on from without.

This attitude cannot be unique. There must be others of the modern stage who are producing in this way, but it is not the old way, and it is not the way in which the public generally thinks of a production being made. Nearly everyone has said: “Isn’t it a terribly difficult experience, having a play put on? Isn’t it nervous work? Don’t you have to fight for your own interpretation?” But it was not difficult. There was nothing “nervous” about it--excepting that one couldn’t engage all the actors who applied for the parts. And so for my own interpretation, my fear was that they were sometimes reading a line in my way to please me when they knew it would be better some other way. I have always believed stage people to be the most likable people alive, and now I know it.

There is far more reason why play producing should be nervous work than that routine work should be so; because, first, there is no routine to follow and, second, everybody involved is in some degree a creative artist--who carries his own authority. By reason of the daily intimacy and the swift work and the high pressure and the risk for everybody, it is true that irony or arbitrary authority or lack of sympathy could make of play producing about as uncomfortable an association as any other association dominated by “nerves”. Perhaps, as Dr. Joseph Jastrow once suggested, all these things are not alone in the domain of art and of ethics but of manners. Or perhaps it is merely that theatrical producers, in common with all other business men, are eliminating waste--waste nerves along with the rest. The roots of art are fed and watered by undivined agencies. In this case I believe that the work ran smoothly because the producer was more intent on getting out of every creative worker his creative bit than in remembering that he was the director and that his way was best. He was not only directing a play--he was dealing with people. The final art.

_William Lyon Phelps_

Few professors of English literature have inspired the undergraduate at large as has William Lyon Phelps of Yale University. Professor Phelps humanizes literature, understands the ordinary human being’s approach to it, loves a good joke and is a constant but a master punster. As a lecturer he is known from coast to coast. His word on books is gospel to librarians and club women. This is due partly to his keen sense of the dramatic. If you could sit under him at Yale you would understand what I mean. Thoroughly of Connecticut is Professor Phelps. He was born in Hartford and educated at Yale, where he has lived ever since except for summers in Michigan and a sojourn for post-graduate work at Harvard. His published volumes are innumerable, as are his interests and activities. Alive to every movement in the theatre, exceedingly fond of music, interested in young people and their efforts, he is as definite a personality in American educational and literary life as I know. His library at New Haven, with its crackling fire, the Browning chair, Rufus the dog, and Mrs. Phelps, the always cordial hostess, is filled with undergraduates on any winter Sunday afternoon. Probably no man now living has created a love of books in so great a number of souls as has William Lyon Phelps. This is a task worth the greatest effort. It is one which needs must be prompted by enthusiasm which is a quality Professor Phelps has in the highest degree.

THE WHY OF THE BEST SELLER

There is no formula to fit the best seller. The Bible and Shakespeare are best sellers, and among authors of our time, such kindred souls as Henry Adams and Harold Bell Wright are emphatically in this class, though Wright somewhat more emphatically than Adams. The novel, “Main Street”, which included among its targets people who buy best sellers, is itself a best seller. The inhabitants of Main Street would seem to have a counter-weight in a balancing number of those who laugh at them. Thus, at all events, the country is safe. Complacency finds its complement in ridicule.

I admire both “Main Street” and its author; I rejoice in his success; but the cyclonic popularity of the book--if foreseen--might conceivably have tempered its zeal. To prove that people need it as much as they apparently want it, it should circulate only among the élite and be either vaguely irritating or downright incomprehensible to the general. Instead of being caviar, it is shredded wheat. The other alternative is that there are two million five hundred thousand élite in America, allowing conservatively five readers to every copy, and remembering that the sale has considerably increased since I began to write this article. Now to believe that there are millions of the élite in America is to believe that this is indeed God’s country; such a belief would put the believer forever on Main Street. The publishers do not regret the popularity of the book; and I hope Mr. Lewis has no qualms. He now has leisure to write even a better one, which he is certainly capable of doing.

Although Emerson’s squirrel did not envy the mountain, that was because he was Emerson’s squirrel, not a real one. Nearly everything small would like to be big. Many of the German dramatists who scorn Sudermann have unsuccessfully tried to copy his methods--so I read in the work of a German critic. There is no doubt that Henry James would have rejoiced in an enormous public, though in his art he followed the Rehoboam method. The small colleges have their distinct and inimitable merits; of which most of them are quietly and justly proud; but a few of them advertise the benefits of smallness so energetically that if it always paid to advertise, they would lose the quality advertised, as Professor Briggs has said in his own way.

Almost every great poet, dramatist, and novelist has been famous and popular in his own lifetime. Exceptions are only apparent; either the author has died young or his best work has appeared posthumously. Let no sour author trust in posterity. Posterity is far more cruel than the contemporary public; contemporaries abuse, but posterity forgets. When an author is really great, posterity ratifies contemporary opinion. Unfortunately, however, the fact that greatness is popular does not mean that popularity is a true indication of greatness. Where a once popular author is gone but not forgotten, I mean, when he is damned by posterity, there were dissenters while he was yet alive. Remember the exalted position of Southey and remember what Byron said of him.

Leaving out the rare appearances of genius, there is always I think a discernible reason why a poem, novel, or play is popular. When somebody frowns and says, “I cannot understand why Harold Bell Wright should sell by the million,” he is simply saying that he does not understand human nature. Although many individuals are cruel and selfish, the average person can be easily touched by an imaginary hero or villain--David was instantly stirred by the story of the ewe lamb, yet perhaps at that moment Bathsheba was in the room with her knitting. No critic believes that “Lightnin’” is as good a play as “Riders to the Sea”, but “Lightnin’”, which I am sorry to say bored me, is exactly the kind of thing that we call sure fire. It hit the centre of the bull’s eye, and, as in most plays and stories, the impelling force was a luscious mixture of sweetness and melodrama. It was what people call “wholesome”, which depends perhaps somewhat on the stomach. The vogue of “Lightnin’” is more interesting than the play; I mean we can learn more from it.

The two novelists whose books enjoy the biggest sales in America are Gene Stratton-Porter and Harold Bell Wright. In part they owe their circulation to the invincible sentimentality in the human breast. America has no monopoly of this emotion. These two authors are surely not inferior to the beknighted Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, and the late Mrs. Barclay in England, to the late Georges Ohnet in France, to a hundred sloppy novelists in Germany. Every human heart has a percentage of slush. Why should we be surprised at the vogue of Harold Bell Wright when we remember the Dempsey-Carpentier fight? What must Tex Rickard really think of the intelligence of the public? Nothing like this had been seen since the days of Barnum--the expectation of millions whipped to just the right froth, so that whether the fighters were in condition or not, the public was precisely ripe for picking. It was a shame not to take the money. And how fortunate that Dempsey won, as I fervently hoped he would! If he had lost, the world would have wallowed in a trough of sentimentality. In France, the home of art and intelligence, in Paris, the home of intellectual cynicism and mockery, Carpentier would have eclipsed not only Marshal Foch, but all the poets and dramatists. He might have had any decoration. His wife and child would have come to America; it is terrifying to think of the sentimental gush that would have been slobbered on this excellent family. Carpentier is undoubtedly a good fellow and an attractive personality, and I understand that Dempsey is not popular. But for one thing we should all be grateful to Jack Dempsey--he saved us from ourselves.

I am informed on good authority that one of our motion picture actresses--not _the_ one--receives weekly five hundred sentimental letters from American men. The private irregularities of a millionaire apparently interest more newspaper readers than disarmament or the League of Nations. Therefore let no one wonder at the vogue of Harold Bell Wright, and let no one waste any ammunition on it. His books are certainly better reading than the sensations just mentioned. Any one of his novels costs less than a ticket to a musical comedy, and gives more in return.

A word of encouragement to public librarians. Along with ministers of the gospel and teachers in the grade schools, public librarians form the finest class of people in America, because they do the most good. Their opportunities for helpfulness come every day, and most of them are eager to take advantage of the chance. Now their bugbear is Harold Bell Wright. Every time a boy or girl asks for Harold, they vainly try to give him something else. And their souls are filled with distress when the child walks off with Harold under his arm.

I believe it is better that the infant, whether in or out of his teens, should read Harold Bell Wright than not read at all. And surely his elders, who inhale sentimentality in other forms, cannot justly cast a stone. Wright knows how to tell a story adapted to an elementary grade of intelligence; the reader discovers that books are a permanent source of happiness; with them at any moment he may change his environment and his companions, and live in a world of excitement. After a time, he will in many instances proceed to better and more subtle books, and find happiness of a finer kind. He is in the garden of printed pages; let him not forget that the one who led him through the gates was Harold Bell Wright. My pity goes out to the boy or girl who is not brought up with books; who grows up without any insurance against life.

Personally, I have had enough of Harold Bell Wright. I have read every word of two of his books--“When a Man’s a Man”, and “Helen of the Old House”. This “Helen of the Old House” has the ingredients nicely mixed. It is filled with dripping sentiment. There is not a single real character, no one who resembles a complex human being. Each person is put there to support the thesis--which is, that the only way out of labor troubles is for employer and employé to work harmoniously together. An employé who strikes without good reason is every whit as bad as a German imperialist, says Harold Bell Wright; and an employer who is only a profiteer is bad in just the same way. Granted. Let us then organize against both offenders--against the corrupt capitalist and against Bolshevism. Here Harold is undoubtedly Wright.

Whatever may be this book’s offenses against literary art--and I saw enough without looking for them--it is really a sermon preached on the labor question. And as his solution is correct, true statement being usually unoriginal, it is possible that many of his readers will profit by his discourse, skilfully adapted as it is to their comprehension. I believe his motive is excellent; he wishes to use his prodigious popularity to help his country and humanity. He knows well enough that the shortest cut to the ordinary intelligence is by the sentimental route, and like a spellbinder, his muzzle velocity is very high. The difficulty is that if the world could be saved by sentimental melodrama, we should have been saved long ago. Nearly all sentimental melodramas are on the side of virtue; as were the novels of Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger, Jr.

I have no particular desire to join the army of those who satirize virtue. As between virtue and vice, even in this ridiculous world, virtue actually seems to me less absurd than vice.

The case of Gene Stratton-Porter is not quite so easy as that of her running mate. The publishers tell us that nine million copies of her books have been sold. With five readers to each copy, this means a circulation of forty-five million. She is a public institution, like Yellowstone Park, and I should not think she would care any more than a mountain for adverse criticism. She does, though. Wise men know that more than half the things that appear in print are not true, and yet many have such a superstitious reverence for type that an attack or a misrepresentation fills them with real agony. Even those whose position seems immovable--Pope, Tennyson, Henry James--suffered torture when they read an adverse criticism printed in an ephemeral paper, and written by a nobody. One of Yale’s greatest presidents, in the eighteenth century, saw an unfavorable criticism of his book in an English journal, and he immediately fainted away.

Gene Stratton-Porter lives in a swamp, arrays herself in man’s clothes, and sallies forth in all weathers to study the secrets of nature. I believe she knows every bug, bird, and beast in the woods. I believe she recognizes every sound in a forest, and can tell you what caused it. She is primarily a naturalist, one of the foremost in America, and has published a number of books on flora and fauna, illustrated with photographs of her own taking. These books--which are closest to her heart--have only a moderate sale. Thus she hit upon the plan of writing sentimental novels, in which her observation of nature is brought to the attention of America. I have no doubt that she has led millions of boys and girls into the study of natural objects; that she has accomplished in this way much permanent good.

She is as full of energy as Roosevelt, and as hearty an American. She could have retired on a fortune long ago, but she will never retire until the day of her death, which I hope may be long distant. She is eaten up with ambition, and with the joy of life; few have more fun in their daily existence than she. I have no doubt that if the public could see some of the letters which she receives by the cartload, they would share her belief that she has not lived in vain.

I have read three of her novels--“A Girl of the Limberlost”, “A Daughter of the Land”, and the one just published, “Her Father’s Daughter”. The first of these with all its nature lore, was rather too sentimental for me, and the third impossible; but I defy any unprejudiced person to read “A Daughter of the Land” to the end, without enthusiasm for the story. The style is so crude that one must determine not to be stopped by it; one must not quit. Apart from the lack of stylistic art, one will find an admirable story, with a real plot and real characters; nothing is shirked or softened in the course of the novel, and the heroine is a girl that holds one’s attention, not merely by what happens to her, but by what she is. There is a certain grandeur in the conception of the tale, like a great architectural idea disguised by bad drawing. Furthermore, just now, when everybody thinks everybody else ought to be a farmer, this epic of the farm has a particular importance. Here was a girl who really loved the country; loved living on a farm; loved all kinds of agricultural work; loved to make and see things grow. And, as presented in the novel, this love is understandable and intelligible. There are not many such girls. But it would be well if there were more.

Living all her life in daily contact with nature, there is an elemental force in Gene Stratton-Porter which partly accounts for the hitting power of her novels. But in her latest story, “Her Father’s Daughter”, her passion for the California mountains and deserts has made her neglect not only the graces of style but the reality of her supposedly human beings. Linda, the high school wonder, is an impossible person; and the contrast between her, as a child of nature, and her supposititious sister, Eileen, stands out too grossly. By far the best things in this book are the cooking receipts and the intimate facts about the desert. Here the reader feels like a child in the author’s hands.

In addition to the literary shortcomings of this novel, it is sadly marred by anti-Japanese propaganda. Somebody in California has been stuffing our novelist, who is more gullible in international politics than in the study of nature. The villain of the story is a Japanese, who, enraged at losing his place at the head of his class in the high school, attempts to murder the boy who outpaced him, and is himself done to death by Katherine O’Donovan, the Strong Cook, otherwise the best character in the novel.

Despite my disappointment in “Her Father’s Daughter”, I shall read Gene Stratton-Porter’s next novel. If she is not a literary artist, she is anyhow a wonderful woman. No one lives closer to nature than she; and her undoubted vigor comes partly from this contact.

But if one wishes to see the difference between girls that are made to fit a purpose, and a real girl--the difference between puppets and humanity--let one, after reading “Helen of the Old House”, and “Her Father’s Daughter”, study with attention Booth Tarkington’s “Alice Adams”.

_Kenneth Macgowan_