Part 5

The plight of the theatres is strictly analogous to that of the magazines. The moving-pictures have wiped out their galleries and decimated their balconies. A well-filled orchestra is not quite enough to support the usual production. The managers have either capitulated to the films entirely by putting "movies" on their stages, or have attempted to get the deserters back by competing with the films through the use of cheapened drama. Melodramatic farce, with an abundance of action, is the only form of play which is not now a drug on the managerial market. That is, to be sure, a respectable form of amusement, but there are some of us who would like occasionally to see something else. Perhaps the little theatres, like the little reviews, will become our refuge. Some of us believe that the managers who still stick to live actors would be better off if they would stop trying to compete with the moving-picture on its own ground and produce solid work for which the legitimate stage is alone adapted. We can substantiate our theory by the fact that at one time this spring nearly the only successful plays in New York were the revivals of Fitch's _The Truth_ and Wilde's _Lady Windermere's Fan_. But the temper of most managers and playwrights is not encouraging. Not many days ago a group of successful writers were gathered for the week-end at the house of a producer. One of them was reading a new manuscript. Another interrupted him to say quite seriously: "That's not right, old chap. You ought to get a laugh two-thirds of the way down that page." Whereupon the reader inserted a "joke" about a Ford car and an automobile.

There is a danger, however, in the little theatre idea. Little theatres may grow to have the same sort of insincere "style" and disgusting appeal to social snobbery which are the characteristics of magazines like _Vogue_. As in the case of the magazines, the best thing that could happen would be the appearance of a genius of so much life and power that he could drive the crowds before him and produce his plays in the open air of real public appreciation. The coming of the moving-picture has only aggravated a problem which was previously acute. The crisis is here; for that we must be grateful to the films and the cheap magazines. Shall the rule of the people produce nothing better than a race of commercial craftsmen whose only thought is to make money by exploiting the least worthy instincts of the people? Or shall we produce at least a few courageous leaders who, speaking out of their own authority, shall lead the people after them? The faithful can, while they are waiting, keep alive the sacred fires and scan the horizon for the new prophet. His victory can come, not by compromise, but by aggressive power.

There is one growing form of drama which is genuine in its art and may become popular in its appeal; the development of this is being carefully watched by those who are alert. It is but a step from a moving-picture such as D'Annunzio's Cabiria to a spectacle such as Reinhardt's _The Miracle_. The latter is coming to us next winter; Madison Square Garden will be its stage. Sheldon has written an unusual spectacle play which George Tyler will produce. Let these things not be confused with such orgies of stage-setting as _The Garden of Allah_; it is quite possible to use the visual element as a principal means of "getting over" the dramatic expression without doing so badly. To condemn all such productions because some of them happen to be over-realistic, is to condemn all painting because of Meissonier.

May it not be that a great trouble of our drama has been the failure to recognize the fact that the picture is just as important an element of the stage as the dialogue? Every French actress receives a thorough training in pantomime; in America anyone with a sensitive eye will squirm under the inept and ugly line-compositions presented by our actresses in their gestures. And as for stage-setting, the height of our ambition has seemed to be to get a door that will really slam, or to fill the stage with pink apple-blossoms--the audience will always applaud pink. The resolution of these crude attempts into something that really makes a good appeal to the eye is no new thing; but for a long time we have not been ready for the work of Reinhardt or Gordon Craig on the one side or of the Russian Ballet on the other. Now the moving-pictures are at once educating our eyes to watch drama, and are undermining the support of old-fashioned plays which, through their very excellent mediocrity, prevented the encroachment of new ideas. Let us go to the theatres next fall prepared to trace the beginnings of a new stage art in this country; in the meantime, however, not hoping to escape the flood of cheap and artistically vicious stuff with which the commercial managers and producers will attempt to drown our sensibilities.

There is more active charity in the egoism of a strenuous, far-seeing soul than in the devotion of a soul that is helpless and blind.--_Maeterlinck._

Book Discussion

The Gospel According to Moore

_Ave_, by George Moore. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

Mr. George Moore has finished his autobiographic triology, _Hail and Farewell_, and has shaken the dust of Ireland from his feet. The Celtic Renaissance must make its way without his help or hindrance. He came, he pondered, he withdrew. In these astonishing volumes we have the whole story of his adventures and his thoughts, and an unrivalled series of impressionistic portraits of his friends. We see Yeats in his long cloak, looking like a melancholy rook; Lady Gregory, the poet's devoted disciple; Edward Martyn and his soul; Plunkett and Gill, the Bouvard and Pécuchet of real life; AE "who settles everybody's difficulties and consoles the afflicted"; Colonel Moore, the author's brother; and we catch an occasional glimpse of Arthur Symons, Synge, James Stephens, and many others. But the book is very different from the ordinary _Sunlights and Shadows of My Short Life_. It is a remarkable piece of self-portraiture and an explanation of the author's attitude toward art and the Christian religion.

It was during the composition of the stories contained in _The Untilled Field_ that Mr. Moore came to realize that the Celt was but a herdsman, and that art had steadily declined in Ireland since the Irish Church was joined to Rome. But what was the reason for this decline? Was it due to the race or to Catholicism? Mr. Moore and his friends discussed this question at length and considered the history of literature in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. Their discoveries astonished him, for the case against Catholicism was even stronger than he had hoped for.

About two thousand years ago the Ecclesiastic started out to crush life, and "in three centuries humility, resignation and obedience were accepted as virtues; the shrines of the gods were abandoned; the beautiful limbs of the lover and athlete were forbidden to the sculptor and the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered him instead. Literature died, for literature can but praise life. Music died, for music can but praise life, and the lugubrious _Dies Irae_ was heard in the fanes. What use had a world for art when the creed current among men was that life is a mean and miserable thing? So amid lugubrious chant and solemn procession the dusk thickened until the moment of deepest night was reached in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. In the fifteenth century the dawn began in Italy, and sculptors and painters turned their eyes toward Greece." Dante was a Catholic, although not a very orthodox one, and Catholicism can make a valid claim to the cathedrals and the choral music of Vittoria and Palestrina. But the painters of the Renaissance were as pagan as Cæsar Borgia and only chose religious subjects as a pretext for drawing and to meet a certain demand. In fact, the whole spirit of the Renaissance was pagan and progressive, and a return to the Middle Ages was averted when "that disagreeable monk, Savonarola," was burned at the stake. After this new birth came the Reformation, resulting in the Council of Trent, which forbade all speculation on the meaning and value of life and arranged "the Catholic's journey from the cradle to the grave as carefully as any tour planned by that excellent firm, Messrs. Cook and Sons." As a result there has been practically no Catholic literature since that time.

"Art is but praise of life, and it is only through the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it was France that forced open the deadly fingers of the Ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom again." Descartes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Merimee, George Sand, Flaubert, Zola, and Maupassant are all agnostics. The most important Christians are Pascal, Racine, and Corneille, who wrote mere imitations of the Greek drama without any criticism of life, and Verlaine, who embraced the Church in an ecstasy more sensuous than religious. In Germany there are Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche--no Catholics and mainly agnostic. In Russia we find the utterly unmoral Turgenev and Tolstoy, who professed to be a Christian, but, as Mr. Moore points out, did not believe in the Resurrection of the Body. In Italy the main figure since the Reformation is an artist of today, the pagan D'Annunzio. In Spain there is one great Catholic work, _Don Quixote_, but it is completely unethical. Among the Scandinavians, Ibsen, Bjornson, and Strindberg are agnostics. In England the main evidence for the defence is found in Pope, who called himself a Christian, but wrote _The Essay on Man_, and Cardinal Newman, who, according to Carlyle, had a brain like a half-grown rabbit. In America there are Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, and Whitman--Protestant and agnostic.

The reason for all this has been explained by Mr. Moore again and again. It lies in the fact that the Church has always preferred the obedient and poor in spirit to the courageous and the wise. Religion is strongest among ignorant and weak-minded people, and as far back as the book of Genesis we read of God's anger at the man and woman who ate of the forbidden fruit. "The two great enemies of religion are the desire to live and the desire to know," and the whole tendency of art is to increase and strengthen these desires. Another thing for which the Church is responsible is the present attitude toward love. Mr. Moore writes with pride of "the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead." He insists with Gautier that earth is as beautiful as heaven.

When he had decided that literature was incompatible with dogma, Mr. Moore found himself in a decidedly unpleasant situation. He had changed the course of his life to take part in the Irish Renaissance, and now he realized that the Irish Renaissance was a mere bubble. The whole history of the world showed that literature could not be produced in a Roman Catholic country. The only thing for him to do was to leave Ireland, but in the meanwhile he felt that he must declare himself a Protestant. Between art and religion there could be but one choice for him; the religion must be changed. It is true that he had never acquiesced in any of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, but he had been baptized in that Church, and he had always been considered a Catholic. Protestantism seemed much preferable, because Protestantism leaves the mind very nearly free. In the _Confessions of a Young Man_, he had already expressed his prejudice in its favor. "Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brigands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incensed silence of the Vatican." And so Mr. Moore after several futile interviews with the Anglican priest wrote to _The Irish Times_ announcing his change from the Church of Rome, and began the composition of _Hail and Farewell_ as the best means in his power to liberate his country priestcraft.

P. M. HENRY.

Smile and Scream: Chekhov and Andreyev

_Stories of Russian Life_, by Anton Tchekoff; translated by Marian Fell. [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.]

_Savva_ and _The Life of Man_, by Leonid Andreyev; translated from the French (!) by Thomas Seltzer. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]

A French critic characterized Russian literature as Heroic. Tragic would perhaps be a happier definition; what has been Russian life, and hence its literature, but a continuous tragedy? Gogol looked into that life and burst into a homeric laughter which ultimately drove him insane; the "repenting nobleman" Turgenyev was devoured by melancholy over his sad heroes and heroines; the "cruel genius" of Dostoyevsky convulsively writhed in contemplation of the "humiliated and offended"; Chekhov, who had begun his career in the gayest humor, turned eventually gloomy and pronounced his diagnosis: Such life is impossible; even Gorky, the chanter of hymns to the proud Man, was crushed and silenced by grim reality, and his scepter of the idol of young Russia passed into the hands of the most pessimistic writer, Andreyev.

O forgive me, my unfortunate people: Not one gay song have I sung for you yet!

_Frug._

* * * * *

Tutchev found a mysterious beauty in the brightness of autumn evenings:

Wane, enfeeblement, and on all-- That mild smile of decay Which in sensible creatures we call Exalted meekness of suffering.

Such was the smile of Anton Chekhov. Run through his works, look at the sad faces of his heroes, listen to the yearning effusions of his women, observe _his_ Nature, his skies and steppes, and your heart will shrink before that smile of fading autumn. He knew and understood Russian life better than any other writer, and keenly felt its tragicness and ... hopelessness. Therefore he did not protest or advocate, did not denounce or propagate, did not shout or curse, as most of his colleagues did: for what is the use? He only smiled, a sad gripping smile that maddens the sensitive reader--a smile of ennui and helplessness characteristic of the Russian "soilless" intellectual. I believe it was this smile, which masqued an abyss of sorrow and pain, that early extinguished Chekhov's life; it is so much easier and more healthful to scream and howl than to smile under torture.

The stories translated by Miss Fell are far not of the best (by the way: why not use a correct transliteration? Why that half-German, half-English "Tchekoff"?). I suspect that the translator endeavored to choose the least typically-Russian sketches in the hope that they would be more "understandable" to the foreign reader; such attempts generally fail to convey the real atmosphere. "If you wish to know the Poet, you must go into the Poet's land," said Goethe. On the whole, however, the book is imbued with the Chekhovian _leit-motif_--the longing, struggling, crippled Russian soul.

Leonid Andreyev is of a dual personality: the artist, and the mouthpiece of society. In his early sketches, in his short stories, and in his greatest achievement, _The Seven Who Were Hanged_, he is the wonderful psychologist, the unveiler of the soul mysteries with an art that approaches that of Maeterlinck. Russian reality, however, is a Moloch clamoring victims; the powerful tragedy of life absorbs and subjugates all individual forces, and it requires great artistic strength to preserve aloofness from the burning problems of the day. Andreyev has witnessed the most appalling epoch in his country's history: disastrous war, revolution, reaction, famine, national demoralization. He has been tempted to interpret the passing events, a perilous path for an artist whose field of observation must lie either in the crystallized past or in the dim future, never in chronicling the floating present. In his stories and plays of that later period, Andreyev revealed such horrors, such gruesome scenes, that we have felt as if we were in a Gallery of Tortures. Horror shrieks, screams, beats upon our senses, maddens us. But the colors are too loud, the medium of tickling our sensations too vulgar. I recall a passage from Merezhkovsky, a description of one of the museums in Florence. There is a head of Dante; the face is calm, almost indifferent, yet one sees at once that it is a face of one who saw hell. In the same room hangs a wax-image of Plague, with hideous details--rotting cadavers with outpouring bowels in which swarm enormous worms. The Sunday-visitors pass by Dante's head yawning, but wistfully crowd at the wax Plague. I confess this scene, at times, makes me draw an analogy with Chekhov and Andreyev.

As a playwright Andreyev has utterly failed; he lacks dramatic constraint and proportion. He puts into the mouths of his actors bombastic phrases, to the delight of the gallery; but there is absolutely too much talking in his plays, with very little drama. The two plays published in the book now before me, _Savva_ and _Life of Man_, have caused more discussion than any of his other plays,--a fact due not to their particular merit, but to their pyrotechnic effects and "understandableness."

Savva, a young man "with a suggestion of the peasant in his looks," has a modest intention to annihilate everything.

Man is to remain, of course. What is in his way is the stupidity that, piling up for thousands of years, has grown into a mountain. The modern sages want to build on this mountain, but that, of course, will lead to nothing but making the mountain still higher. It is the mountain itself that must be removed. It must be levelled to its foundation, down to the bare earth.

... Annihilate everything! The old houses, the old cities, the old literature, the old art.... All the old dress must go. Man must be stripped bare and left on a naked earth! Then he will build up a new life. The earth must be denuded; it must be stripped of its hideous old rags. It deserves to be arrayed in a king's mantle; but what have they done with it? They have dressed it in coarse fustian, in convict clothes. They've built cities, the idiots!

... Believe me, monk, I have been in many cities and in many lands. Nowhere did I see a free man. I saw only slaves. I saw the cages in which they live, the beds on which they are born and die; I saw their hatreds and their loves, their sins and their good works. And I saw also their amusements, their pitiful attempts to bring dead joy back to life again. And everything that I saw bore the stamp of stupidity and unreason. He that is born wise turns stupid in their midst: he that is born cheerful hangs himself from boredom and sticks out his tongue at them. Amidst the flowers of the beautiful earth--you have no idea how beautiful the earth is, monk--they have erected insane asylums. And what are they doing with their children? I have never yet seen parents who do not deserve capital punishment; first because they begot children, and secondly, because, having begot them, they did not immediately commit suicide.

Well, how is this _enfant terrible_--the trumpeter of a popularized edition of Schopenhauer, Bakounin, Stirner, Nietzsche, etc., etc.--how is this "bad man" going to carry through his gigantic plans? In a very simple manner: he will destroy the wonder-working ikon of the Saviour, that made the monastery of his native town famous; he will place a bomb behind the ikon, and its explosion will open the eyes of the ignorant believers. A tempest in a cup of water! But hark and tremble:

When we are through with God, we'll go for fellows like him. There are lots of them--Titian, Shakespeare, Byron. We'll make a nice pile of the whole lot and pour oil over it. Then we'll burn their cities.

Monologues, long and pretentious like those quoted, fill up the play to a point of dizziness; yet there are a few oases in that unhappy work, where you find the real Andreyev, the unrivalled painter of sorrow and suffering. Here is, for instance, one of the pilgrims, a man who had killed accidentally his son and has since been wandering from monastery to monastery, fasting, wearing heavy chains, and indulging in all sorts of self-chastisement. The cynical monks give him the cruel nickname of King Herod, which he bears, like his other burdens, with the joy of a martyr. Listen to his unsophisticated talk:

_King Herod_: I am wise. My sorrow has made me so. It is a great sorrow. There is none greater on earth. I killed my son with my own hand. Not the hand you are looking at, but the one which isn't here.

_Savva_: Where is it?

_King Herod_: I burnt it. I held it in the stove and let it burn up to my elbow.

_Savva_: Did that relieve you?

_King Herod_: No. Fire cannot destroy my grief. It burns with a heat that is greater than fire.... No, young man, fire is weak. Spit on it and it is quenched.

Our hero, Savva, is naturally offended, for his motto is _Ignis sanat_, and he is determined to cure the world with fire. The pilgrim calmly rejoinds:

No, boy. Every fire goes out when its time comes. My grief is great, so great that when I look around me I say to myself: good heavens, what has become of everything else that's large and great? Where has it all gone to? The forest is small, the house is small, the mountain is small, the whole earth is small, a mere poppy seed. You have to walk cautiously and look out, lest you reach the end and drop off.

..........

_Speransky_: I feel blue.

_King Herod_: Keep still, keep still, I don't want to listen. You are suffering? Keep still. I am a man too, brother, so I don't understand. I'll insult you if you don't look out.

... Here I am with my sorrow. You see what it is--there is no greater on earth. And yet if God spoke to me and said, "Yeremy, I will give you the whole earth if you give me your grief," I wouldn't give it away. I will not give it away, friend. It is sweeter to me than honey; it is stronger than the strongest drink. Through it I have learned the truth.

_Savva_: God?

_King Herod_: Christ--that's the one! He alone can understand the sorrow that is in me. He sees and understands. "Yes, Yeremy, I see how you suffer." That's all. "I see." And I answer Him: "Yes, O Lord, behold my sorrow!" That's all. No more is necessary.

_Savva_: What you value in Christ is His suffering...?

_King Herod_: You mean His crucifixion? No, brother, that suffering was a trifle. They crucified him--what did that matter? The important point was that thereby He came to know the truth. As long as He walked the earth, He was--well--a man, rather a good man--talking here and there about this and that.... But when these same fellows carried Him off to the cross and went at Him with knouts, whips, and lashes, then His eyes were opened. "Aha!" He said, "so that's what it is!" And He prayed: "I cannot endure such suffering. I thought it would be a simple crucifixion; but, O Father in Heaven, what is this?" And the Father said to Him: "Never mind, never mind, Son! Know the truth, know what it is." And from then on He fell to sorrowing, and has been sorrowing to this day.