Part 5

What will Americans think of the book providing it becomes popular?—and it may. (The idolatrous regard born in this country for Russian art instances the possibilities of American hysteria directed in the proper channels.) The great majority of them, however—particularly those with whom I have mentioned my horror of spending ten years—will feel it incumbent upon them to be outraged, none more so than the criminal fraternity. It is perhaps stretching a point to say that even so were the highly and lowly estimable backbones of an earlier period of less comparative moribund piety outraged by the Sermon on the Mount. But there is a promising likelihood that their ectypes will never read the volume and will thus be saved or lost or whatever you will. And those who see the light from this Sermon in the Depths can effect an exclusiveness which will merit them the flattering curses and derisions of their fellow men for many sweet years to come.

The translation is by Constance Garnett and is excellently done. Mrs. Garnett, more than any linguist, has in her work conveyed the atmosphere and idiom and temperament of the Russian into English. She is responsible for the remarkable translations of Turgeniev which have carried his art unchanged into another tongue, as well as for the Dostoevsky novels. For the benefit of readers who will be puzzled by her footnote on page 11, the “Green Street” which she is unable to define is the avenue formed between two ranks of prison soldiers through which the condemned convict is wheeled and beaten. The soldiers stand armed with fresh, green sticks which flash brightly in the sun as they swish down on the naked back—hence the jocular name.

[1] _The Macmillan Company, New York._

Notes For a Review of “The Spoon River Anthology”

CARL SANDBURG

_The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. (The Macmillan Company, New York)_

I saw Masters write this book. He wrote it in snatched moments between fighting injunctions against a waitresses’ union striving for the right to picket and gain one day’s rest a week, battling from court to court for compensation to a railroad engineer rendered a loathsome cripple by the defective machinery of a locomotive, having his life amid affairs as intense as those he writes of.

At The Book and Play Club one night Masters tried to tell how he came to write the Anthology. Of course, he couldn’t tell. There are no writers of great books able to tell the how and why of a dominating spirit that seizes them and wrenches the flashing pages from them. But there are a few forces known that play a part. And among these Masters said he wanted emphasis placed on _Poetry_, voices calling “Unhand me,” verses and lines from all manner and schools of writers welcomed in Harriet Monroe’s magazine.

Once in a while a man comes along who writes a book that has his own heart-beats in it. The people whose faces look out from the pages of the book are the people of life itself, each trait of them as plain or as mysterious as in the old home valley where the writer came from. Such a writer and book are realized here.

Masters’ home town is Lewiston, Illinois, on the banks of the Spoon River. There actually is such a river where Masters waded bare-foot as a boy, and where the dead and the living folk of his book have fished or swam, or thrown pebbles and watched the widening circles. It is not far, less than a few hours’ drive, from where Abraham Lincoln was raised. People who knew Lincoln are living there today.

Well, some two hundred and twenty portraits in free verse have been etched by Masters from this valley. They are Illinois people. Also they are the people of anywhere and everywhere in so-called civilization.

Aner Clute is the immortal girl of the streets. Chase Henry is the town drunkard of all time. The railroad lawyer, the corrupt judge, the prohibitionist, the various adulterers and adulteresses, the Sunday School superintendent, the mothers and fathers who lived for sacrifice in gratitude, joy,—all these people look out from this book with haunting eyes, and there are baffled mouths and brows calm in the facing of their destinies.

When a few of the pieces in this book reached Ezra Pound, the judgment he passed upon them was that they are real and great poetry from the hand of a new and a genuine American poet. It was Alice Corbin Henderson who was the first American critic to seize upon some of these poems as they were running in _The St. Louis Mirror_, and put them forward in _Poetry_ as striking, indigenous, out of the soil of America as a home-land. William Marion Reedy, editor of _The St. Louis Mirror_, is accredited by Masters for the keen enthusiasm with which he helped him carry along the work of writing.

In the year 1914 Masters not only handled all of his regular law practice, heavy and grilling. Besides, he wrote _The Spoon River Anthology_. There were times when he was clean fagged with the day’s work. But a spell was on him to throw into written form a picture gallery, a series of short movies of individuals he had seen back home. Each page in the anthology is a locked-up portrait now freed.

The stress of this bore down on Masters. Just before the proof sheets for his book came to his hands, he went down with fever and pneumonia and a complex of physical ills. It was the first time in his life he was willing to admit he was “sick abed.”

There is vitality, drops of heart blood, poured into Lee Masters’ book. He has other books in him as vivid and poignant. Let us hope luck holds him by the hand and takes him along where he can write out these other ones.

Poetry and the Panama-Pacific

EUNICE TIETJENS

Has poetry, as an art, any meaning whatever for the American people, or has all the recent ink which has been spilled in proclaiming a renascence of American poetry gone only to water the roots of the publishing business? These are questions which will be forced upon the mind of every admirer of the lyric muse in contemplating the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. For in spite of the millions of money and the acres of ground at the disposal of the American sections there is nowhere, except in the commercial exhibits of the publishers, any recognition of the existence of contemporary poetry.

When taxed with the fact that the art is unrepresented the heads of the departments point deprecatingly to the fact that as a decorative feature of certain architectural archways poetical quotations are used. There is a quotation from Confucius, one from the Kalidasa, several from Edmund Spencer, and one (O Triumph of Modernity!) from Walt Whitman. As no commercial exhibit is accepted which was in existence at the time of the St. Louis Exposition this answer is doubly enlightening.

All the other arts are here. Architecture, music, sculpture, mural and easel painting, drawing, prints and etching, landscape gardening, together with the so-called “Liberal Arts” are adequately represented. But not poetry. A perusal of the “P’s” of the official list in an attempt to discover it is significant. “Poultry” is there with a large exhibit, so is “Plumbago,” “Plumbers’ Implements,” “Pomology” and “Ponies.” Excellent exhibits all, but hardly lyrical.

It may be urged, of course, that other arts, such as the arts of the theatre, acting and stagecraft, and the literary art of prose writing, are also omitted. But although exhibitions of these things would be eminently desirable they present great practical difficulties. And these arts have, after all, a commercial side which is more or less adequately suggested. But with poetry the case is different. The mere fact that commercially poetry is, like Perlmutter’s automobile, a liability and not an asset, ought in our practical age to prove that it is a “fine art!” And the practical difficulty of providing a set of bookshelves and a competent jury to pass on admissions need hardly stagger the directors of so colossal an undertaking. Add to this daily, or even bi-weekly, readings of contemporary poetry and the result would be a representation in proportion to the attention paid the other arts.

It would be useless to urge that this Exposition is a private, or even a local enterprise. It cannot stand as such. It represents in the face of the warring world the development of our country, culturally as well as commercially. And the fact that one of the oldest and most reverenced of the arts is totally unrepresented must inevitably redound to the discredit of the executive officers, and through them of the people at large.

For the root of this cavalier treatment of poetry is, after all, in the American people. As a nation, in spite of our complacency in the present world crisis, we are still in the stage of culture in which we believe that man can live by bread alone. And we can scarcely hope for more adequate recognition of the art until those of us to whom poetry is a living fact, and not an academic perception, have battled at greater length and with greater self-sacrifice in the eternal struggle through commercialism to beauty.

The Mob-God

The seats creak expectantly. The white whirr of the movie machine takes on a special significance. In the murky gloom of the theater you can watch row on row of backs becoming suddenly enthusiastic, necks growing suddenly alive, heads rising to a fresh angle. Turning around you can see the stupid masks falling, vacant eyes lighting up, lips parting and waiting the smile, mouths opening waiting to laugh. A miracle is transpiring. A sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism, a smear of dead nerves, dead skin, fiberless flesh is beginning to quiver with an emotion. Laughter is about to be born. The lights dance on the screen in front. Letters appear in two short words and a gasp sweeps from mouth to mouth.

The name of a Mob-God flashes before the eyes. Suddenly the screen in front vanishes. In its place appears a road stretching away to the sky and lined with trees. The sky is clear. The scene is cool and healthy. The leaves of the trees flutter familiarly. The road smiles like an old friend. And far in the distance a speck appears and moves slowly and jerkily. Wide open mouths and freshened eyes watch the speck grow larger. It takes the form of a man, a little man with a thin cane. At last his baggy trousers and his slovenly shoes are visible. His thick curly hair under the battered derby becomes clear. He walks along carelessly, quietly, with an infinite philosophy. He walks with an indescribable step, kicking up one of his feet, shuffling along.

Laughter is born. The vapid faces respond magically to His presence. Pure, childish delight sounds. The faces are bathed in a human light. A noisy, wholesome din fills the theater. And the little man comes down the road with his calm and solemn face, his sad eyes, his impossible mustache, his ridiculous trousers, and his nervous, spasmodic gait amid the roars and wild elation of idiots, prostitutes, crass, common churls, and empty souls converted suddenly into a natural and mutual simplicity. The stuffy, maddening “bathoes” that clings to the mob like a stink is dispelled, wiped out of the air. Laughter, laughter, shrieks and peals, chuckles and smiles, the broad permeating warmth of the simplest, deepest joy is everywhere.

Charlie Chaplin is before them, Charles Chaplin with the wit of a vulgar buffoon and the soul of a world artist. He walks, he stumbles, he dances, he falls. His inimitable gyrations release torrents of mirth clean as spring freshets. He is cruel. He is absurd; unmanly; tawdry; cheap; artificial. And yet behind his crudities, his obscenities, his inartistic and outrageous contortions, his “divinity” shines. He is the Mob-God. He is a child and a clown. He is a gutter snipe and an artist. He is the incarnation of the latent, imperfect, and childlike genius that lies buried under the fiberless flesh of his worshippers. They have created Him in their image. He is the Mob on two legs. They love him and laugh.

“Fruits to Om.”

“Glory to Zeus.”

“Mercy, Jesus.”

“Praised be Allah.”

“Hats off to Charlie Chaplin.”

“THE SCAVANGER.”

The Theatre

“ROSMERSHOLM”

(_The Chicago Little Theatre_)

I don’t want to write about _Rosmersholm_ or about Ibsen now. I want to write about Mme. Borgny Hammer, who is great in the manner of the great Norwegians.

There is a lot of talk about the Russian soul just at present. I wish the Norwegian soul might come in for its share of analysis and appreciation. It is interesting not because of its dark shudderings but because of its intense light and its clearness. It is like the sun; it is like wild flowers—not the delicate but the hardy ones.

Mme. Hammer is this sort of person. She is an actress because she must act or die. She is so intense that the air about her is always “charged”; and she is so natural and simple that you know right away she must be great. There wasn’t a particle of difference between her presence on the stage as the Ibsen heroine and her manner when she meets you on Michigan Avenue and stops to say that Ibsen is so wonderful it’s impossible to cut a line of his dialogue. In both situations she is the genius. Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West was a stunningly-worked-out idea; Mme. Hammer’s was just—Rebecca West. Mrs. Fiske had a theory of the character and presented it in a series of subtle and powerful designs. But what did this wonderful woman do? She didn’t act Rebecca West at all: she just gave you the impression that she is Rebecca every day of her life. She made _Rosmersholm_ a natural scene in the life of some modern family, instead of making it a “study”—an effect in a rather strained psychology.

I wish I could describe Mme. Hammer’s stage conversations—especially the parts where she listens. She is so busy feeling Rebecca West that she has no time to waste in managing her eyes and voice and hands. They take care of themselves just as they would in her own library. When our best actresses “listen” they keep their eyes on the person who is talking with the kind of look that says: “I know it would be bad art now to look at the audience out of the tail of my eye. I must pay close attention to what this actor is saying to me.” Mme. Hammer looks at Rosmer with the same expression she would wear if he were about to say things she hadn’t heard him rehearse every day for six weeks. If she should break out with some dialogue of her own it couldn’t sound any more spontaneous than her reading of the lines Ibsen gave to Rebecca. I know Rebecca’s lines, and yet I forgot them and decided she must be making things up as she went along. What richness of simplicity, and what a sturdy beauty!

I have never seen an actress who cares less about herself than Mme. Hammer and cares so deeply for the character she is presenting. The expressions of her face are marvelous.... She said to me once that she disagreed with critics who thought Hedda Gabler had nothing to give. “She had so much, so very much to give,” she said passionately. No wonder she thinks so: she is a big woman who herself has an infinity of things to give.

M. C. A.

“THE TROJAN WOMEN”

Of the production of _The Trojan Women_ of Euripides by The Little Theatre Company, at the Blackstone Theatre, Sunday, April 11th, one might waste many, many words and much good space. One might make merry over the quaint little mannikins trying their hardest to look like Spartan soldiers. Or again, a whole column might be devoted to the insipid posturings of the saintly-pretty lady who played Helen. Much sarcasm might be expended on the flops done, in the approved French-tragedy style, by the lady who played Andromache. A whole thesis might be written by an enterprising student at some correspondence school on the use of the Vaudeville Spotlight in Classic Greek Tragedy. And Hamlet’s advice to the players might be quoted with some profit to a few of the company: pointed emphasis at the “do not _mouth_ your words” part of the advice, to the lady who speaks the speech beginning:

Lo, yonder ships: I ne’er set foot on one, But tales and pictures tell, when over them Breaketh a storm not all too strong to stem, Each man strives hard, the tiller gripped, the mast Manned, the hull baled, to face it, till at last Too strong breaks the o’erwhelming sea: lo, then They cease, and yield them up as broken men To fate and the wild waters.

And last of all one might say unkind things about the blending of the voices in the chorus.

All the above points, however, I know are very debatable. There are two that cannot be debated. Two that outbalance by far all the other defects of the production.

If all the cast had voices like corncrakes, and used them after the manner of country-town amateurs, the production would still be worth seeing for the thrilling pictures of colour and line presented by individuals and the ensemble. And rising, soaring away above all the petty little defects is the wonderful, majestical verse of Euripides. What could be more beautiful than the lyric:

Even as the sound of a song Left by the way, but long Remembered, a tune of tears Falling where no man hears, In the old house as rain, For things loved of yore: But the dead hath lost his pain And weeps no more.

It is greatly to be regretted that it has been thought fit to cut that lyric, Cassandra’s Hymn to Hymen, and many of the other beautiful parts of the play.

The whole thing might have been better in a hundred ways—then again it might have been worse in ten hundred ways. Let us be glad that we had an opportunity of seeing the wonderful thing, even though the Carnegie Peace Foundation is backing it up.

D.

Music

BUSONI

Busoni—prophet. Where Bauer is a priest, Hofmann a wonder-child, Bachaus a poet, Ganz an efficient, Paderewski a magician, and Samaroff a failure—Busoni is a prophet. His voice arrests the senses, throws a silence over them. At first, the world is obscured; later the last trace of it is gone. The song of the prophet vibrates through new spaces. Listening ones follow without restraint, so great is the magnetic pull of it; they follow, enchanted, through new spaces to new and miraculous realms of life, where music is more real than ivory or pine.

With one paragraph’s deference to the clay-members, let them be informed that Ferruccio Busoni is a composer and concert-pianist, almost fifty years old, who began his study and piano-practice at a most tender age, and who is now considered to be something of an artist—that is, when he isn’t off pursuing some new notion about quarter-tones, or his one hundred and thirteen new scales for the pianoforte. He has these aberrations. But then, musicians are crazy anyway. At a recent concert with the Chicago Symphony Mr. Busoni played one concerto by Saint-Saëns and another one which he himself composed. Incidentally, Mr. Busoni’s composition was based on North America. It is the least bit regrettable that we are so busy and hurried that Mr. Busoni could introduce us, through a work of art, to the country we hurry over. He played these works on an inferior piano and did several questionable things in his playing, such as let his wrist sag, etc. His personal friends insist that he hates to play the piano. Let the clay-members join the blessed minority in silent thanksgiving that he has hated it hard enough to have scornfully brushed aside the limitations of wood and wire, that his hatred is greater than a world of near-love.

On his recent appearance here, at the very start, Busoni passed above the norm of virtuosity in piano-manipulation, and the tonal explorations began. It was quite bewildering. The mob thought it was fine. The authorities had to admit that it was good. Young ladies considered it divine. Professional musicians—always self-appointed and astute critics—were prevented from indulging in their customary snap-judgments while the artist played, and were held, opinionless, to the music. The listeners who possessed not only sensitive ears but also receptive minds and fluent imaginations were swung clear of earth, were lifted into a region where no dead wall separated them from the strong voice of the prophet. He was saying tremendous things. He forced upon smaller minds the rush, the splendor, the glittering plunge of tones, such as they had never dreamed of before. He gave them the dream. And this was what the yet smaller and the very smallest minds, down between the dead walls, admired, but sanctioned grudgingly, as brilliant style. There were noisy hands and exclamations, as at a cock-fight. But the blessed minority heard and recognized the piano-playing of today, tomorrow, and the future. The instrument had at last shaken off the curse of apartment houses, and had come into its own.

Wilhelm Bachaus sings the fancies of a dreamy young poet; Paderewski thrills his audience whether he smiles or sulks at the keyboard; Bauer intones the affirmation of a lovely faith in tonal beauty; Godowsky presents necklaces of perfectly carven gems to the subtly responsive ones; these men and a few others justify their own uses of the pianoforte. They are strongly individual, and are not to be balanced, one against another. Ferruccio Busoni, however, would cast a shadow if he traveled earthward from his altitudes. He is solitary and unique. Others work up through human difficulties in order to perfect their means of expressing tonal ideals. Busoni takes their goal as a fresh starting-point, and tonal ideals become a further means, to voice the surge of strength which he essentially is, to express the resistless, flashing drive of the universe. His flying clusters of notes are the tail of a comet, of some swift participator in cosmic rhythms. The swirl of his music-fire is a glorious something for which the pianoforte must providentially have been created—a genuine offering to the vigilant keepers of Beauty.

HERMAN SCHUCHERT.

TWO CHICAGO PIANISTS

I have not heard all the young Chicago musicians play, but of those I have heard there are two who stand out as musicians and pianists instead of merely good players of the piano. They are Carol Robinson and James Whittaker.

Miss Robinson is an Illinois girl who came to Chicago to be Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler’s “artist pupil” (or something like that) and chief assistant. A year ago she was playing the piano efficiently; this year she is using that as a starting-point and proving that she has a real right to the instrument. She has a technical foundation that cannot fail her; it is already equal to practically all the tests she may need to put it to, and she uses it as surely and unconsciously as one uses his feet to walk with. Her playing at present has the clearness and innocence of a brook; if she can get something of the sea into her feeling she will be big. The music Carol Robinson gives is not so far the expression of some incredible longing to make the piano serve as an outlet. It is natural and beautiful—and absolutely untroubled. It is articulate and yet it has not acquired a meaning. It is without a hint of intensity. Carol Robinson has the most interesting part of the struggle before her—the part for which her genius for hard work is merely a preparation: what does she want to say through the piano?