Part 14

To put such a character into music was a fine thought, but Mr Carpenter must have known that he was foredoomed to failure. It was a notable effort, for no other of our composers had seen the possibilities; most, I fear, did not care to “lower themselves” by the association. Mr Carpenter caught much of the fantasy; it was exactly right for him to make the opening a parody--The Afternoon Nap of a Faun. The “Class A Fit,” the Katnip Blues were also good. (There exists a Sunday Krazy of this very scene--it is 1919, I think, and shows hundreds of Krazy Kats in a wild abandoned revel in the Katnip field--a rout, a bacchanale, a satyr-dance, an erotic festival, with our own Krazy playing the viola in the corner, and Ignatz, who has been drinking, going to sign the pledge.) Mr Carpenter almost missed one essential thing: the ecstasy of Krazy when the brick arrives at the end; certainly, as Mr Bolm danced it one felt only the triumph of Ignatz, one did not feel the grand leaping up of Krazy’s heart, the fulfilment of desire, as the brick fell upon him. The irony was missing. And it was a mistake for Bolm to try it, since it isn’t Russian ballet Krazy requires; it is American dance. One man, one man only can do it right, and I publicly appeal to him to absent him from felicity awhile, and though he do it but once, though but a small number of people may see it, to pay tribute to his one compeer in America, to the one creation equalling his own--I mean, of course, Charlie Chaplin. He has been urged to do many things hostile to his nature; here is one thing he is destined to do. Until then the ballet ought to have Johnny and Ray Dooley for its creators. And I hope that Mr Carpenter hasn’t driven other composers off the subject. There is enough there for Irving Berlin and Deems Taylor to take up. Why don’t they? The music it requires is a jazzed tenderness--as Mr Carpenter knew. In their various ways Berlin and Taylor could accomplish it.

They may not be able to write profoundly in the private idiom of Krazy. I have preserved his spelling and the quotations have given some sense of his style. The accent is partly Dickens and partly Yiddish--and the rest is not to be identified, for it is Krazy. It was odd that in _Vanity Fair’s_ notorious “rankings,” Krazy tied with Doctor Johnson, to whom he owes much of his vocabulary. There is a real sense of the colour of words and a high imagination in such passages as “the echoing cliffs of Kaibito” and “on the north side of ‘wild-cat peak’ the ‘snow squaws’ shake their winter blankets and bring forth a chill which rides the wind with goad and spur, hurling with an icy hand rime, and frost upon a dreamy land musing in the lap of Spring”; and there is the rhythm of wonder and excitement in “Ooy, ‘Ignatz’ it’s awfil; he’s got his legs cut off above his elbows, and he’s wearing shoes, and he’s standing on top of the water.”

Nor, even with Mr Herriman’s help, will a ballet get quite the sense of his shifting backgrounds. He is alone in his freedom of movement; in his large pictures and small, the scene changes at will--it is actually our one work in the expressionistic mode. While Krazy and Ignatz talk they move from mountain to sea; or a tree stunted and flattened with odd ornaments of spots or design, grows suddenly long and thin; or a house changes into a church. The trees in this enchanted mesa are almost always set in flower pots with Coptic and Egyptian designs in the foliage as often as on the pot. There are adobe walls, fantastic cactus plants, strange fungus and growths. And they _compose designs_. For whether he be a primitive or an expressionist, Herriman is an artist; his works are built up; there is a definite relation between his theme and his structure, and between his lines, masses, and his page. His masterpieces in colour show a new delight, for he is as naïve and as assured with colour as with line or black and white. The little figure of Krazy built around the navel, is amazingly adaptable, and Herriman economically makes him express all the emotions with a turn of the hand, a bending of that extraordinary starched bow he wears round the neck, or with a twist of his tail.

And he has had much to express for he has suffered much. I return to the vast enterprises of the Sunday pictures. There is one constructed entirely on the bias. Ignatz orders Krazy to push a huge rock off its base, then to follow it downhill. Down they go, crashing through houses, uprooting trees, tearing tunnels through mountains, the bowlder first, Krazy so intently after that he nearly crashes into it when it stops. He toils painfully back uphill. “Did it gather any moss?” asks Ignatz. “No.” “That’s what I thought.” “L’il fillossiffa,” comments Krazy, “always he seeks the truth, and always he finds it.” There is the great day in which Krazy hears a lecture on the ectoplasm, how “it soars out into the limitless ether, to roam willy-nilly, unleashed, unfettered, and unbound” which becomes for him: “Just imegine having your ‘ectospasm’ running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitliss etha--golla, it’s imbillivibil--” until a toy balloon, which looks like Ignatz precipitates a heroic gesture and a tragedy. And there is the greatest of all, the epic, the Odyssean wanderings of the door:

Krazy beholds a dormouse, a little mouse with a huge door. It impresses him as being terrible that “a mice so small, so dellikit” should carry around a door so heavy with weight. (At this point their Odyssey begins; they use the door to cross a chasm.) “A door is so useless without a house is hitched to it.” (It changes into a raft and they go down stream.) “It has no ikkinomikil value.” (They dine off the door.) “It lecks the werra werra essentials of helpfilniss.” (It shelters them from a hailstorm.) “Historically it is all wrong and misleading.” (It fends the lightning.) “As a thing of beauty it fails in every rispeck.” (It shelters them from the sun and while Krazy goes on to deliver a lecture: “You never see Mr Steve Door, or Mr Torra Door, or Mr Kuspa Door doing it, do you?” and “Can you imagine my li’l friends Ignatz Mice boddering himself with a door?”) his li’l friend Ignatz has appeared with the brick; unseen by Krazy he hurls it; it is intercepted by the door, rebounds, and strikes Ignatz down. Krazy continues his adwice until the dormouse sheers off, and then Krazy sits down to “concentrate his mind on Ignatz and wonda where he is at.”

Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich with something we have too little of--fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam--all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.

_The Damned Effrontery of the Two-a-Day_

THE DAMNED EFFRONTERY OF THE TWO-A-DAY

The narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New York _Tribune_; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played _Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ better than Thomas E. Shea did:

“As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield turned to me and with venomous indignation said, ‘That is damned effrontery!’ It seemed to be Mr Mansfield’s belief that mere dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society.”

To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do with upon what meat has this our Cæsar fed that he is grown so great. The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of Montgomery and Stone may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediæval attitude toward strolling players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable and often interesting. The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel tradition in America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana’s phrase, without any effort to do it justice.) Montgomery and Stone were in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn’t count as Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls went to see him, and so he was Art. The application to vaudeville is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on Broadway as the grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige _may_ venture into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly how far he has condescended to appear before them and accept, even if he doesn’t earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville he is digging his own grave, because there is a stigma attached to the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to “the vestments of refined society.” About every ten years the corrupt desire to be refined takes hold of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly and vaudeville remains simple and good.

It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to discuss it without reference to a possibly more noble past. I am well acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I believe, by Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which, invented or borrowed by him, has become classic. It leads to excellent prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself need not be all brass. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts, more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly coloured, zestful, with sharp outlines; and the classic attitude softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts and numbers of a better day; one _must_ say “music-hall” or be slain in the passages of the Jordan; in America a reference to the _commedia dell’arte_ is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time must come when it is possible to say, “Vaudeville is. Surely it could never have been worse than this--or for that matter, never better. Let us regard it as it is.” The moment must come in the history of general culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is, it happens, the only way I can take it, for in my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called _Change Your Act or Go Back to the Woods_; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and begin _Einst in meinen Jugendjahren_. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four Marxes and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy and Sweeney and Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.

I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a thing I dislike intensely; there is another sort of refinement in vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of technique. It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice’s impersonations is at least partly due to, and has been achieved through, the purely technical mastery she has developed; I am sure that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside; they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have to be always “in the picture,” for though the vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable opportunities, it holds them to strict account; it permits no fumbling, and there are no reparable errors. The materials they use are trivial, yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair’s breadth; the wine they serve is light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not a drop must spill over. There is no great second act to redeem a false entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment’s dulness. The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the presentation, every page has to be _written_, every scene _rendered_, every square inch of the canvas must be _painted_, not daubed with paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case is exactly that of the major arts. It is at least tenable that in this case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.

And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville when the tricky and the bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to see or hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest æsthetic dancing,[20] have heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have witnessed “drama.” If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how do these things get in and get by? Largely as a concession to debased public taste. Note well that all the culture elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its proper music is ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness the success of _A Slice of Life_) is burlesque. Yet like every other popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their boast that it does give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing is heard in connexion with the music played at moving-picture houses) because among its native acts appear _tableaux vivants_ out of Landseer or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of _Les Misérables_. The process continues, regrettably, and extends to the spoiling of good vaudeville material. It isn’t a loss of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is a defamation of something good in the major line and equally a loss of moments when the _“Affairs of” Anatol_ are inexpertly and tastelessly produced “for vaudeville.” But what shall we say of such a real disaster as the return of Miss Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New York, wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has become a “great actress” or is it “an _artiste_”? There was in Miss Levey something roughly elemental, something common and pure; whatever she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success abroad, she returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing, the form heavy but dominant--yet no longer vaudeville. She has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and silk-shaded lamps and draperies and sings _All by Myself_ with shocking bad sentimental _acting_, and gets all she can out of _Love’s Old Sweet Song_ before the touch of her old spirit protests--and recites a dramatic monologue entitled _Destiny!_ Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can’t be good in it if you are too good for it.

I omit the people who aren’t, simply, good enough; there are second-rate people in vaudeville as in everything else, and first-rate people of _its_ second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced, is rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate, nor in the serious artistic playhouse where knowing one’s job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest things in the world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch of technical accuracy which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and stars, whom they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety themselves. They are as much entitled to the jazz bands as any other stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety, although it has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland’s ranking of Ted Lewis as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be perfectly appreciated elsewhere. (The æsthetics of the question have been canvassed in Laokoön, I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up the show in musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack Donahue, who was the sole attraction of another such piece, is always right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular of the big-time acts I am left cold by Van and Schenck, who are perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny, but not witty; their music is current, no more; their rendition is always near enough right to be passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the Six Brown Brothers are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent act, wholly self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other framework, except possibly a one-ring circus; it is a real variety turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these performers everything they do is exquisite.

It isn’t possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the distinctive quality of the head-liners. There are inexplicable things in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch, such as the persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the singing of Belle Baker, who destroys you with _Elie! Elie!_ Houdini is variety as all magicians are and all tricksters--the circus side of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath Brothers, who alone are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the circus. At the present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it burlesques itself. Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the manner of a clown; his despairing cry for the “spot_li-i-i-ght_,” his wail of unhappiness, with his appearance, his gesture, his shambling walk, make him a figure out of the _commedia dell’arte_--one of the few in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their _métier_; their whole fun is in their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of burlesque the accentuated form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to that type, and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real character with his jumping the rope “fi’ thousand conseggitiv times” and “tell ’em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O’Brien.” I am dragged into a catalogue of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit the macabre Moving-Man’s Dream of the Briants, the rustic studies of Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers, and the exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries farther than anyone else the appearance of not knowing the audience is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of human beings, individually probably all right, but _en masse_...! He leaves the stage and passes out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse itself while he’s gone. And his great finale, with a bowl of goldfish, a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated paper bag, and a revolver shot--at the sound of which exactly nothing happens, is the last word in destroying the paraphernalia of the magician and all his works.

I have committed myself to the statement that Joe Cook is perfect and am in no mood to withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can see him in no other _milieu_ because he lacks the gift--not needed in vaudeville, though useful there--of holding the audience in his hand. He is liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles, smiles, and laughter; seldom with guffaws. This is not necessarily to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville is made. As Ethel Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be, so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right. Yet to give the quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.

He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the “dippy” kind so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is structural. Mr Cook’s is probably the longest single act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.

His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to--but no one has ever discovered where it does go to. For after the card tricks--the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks after five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment’s notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is--Mr Cook finds it necessary to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savour his humours.

In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are _you_? Fine, how’s yourself? Good. And you? Splendid. How’s your uncle? I haven’t got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He’s fine. How are _you_? He is amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have ever seen: George M. Cohan.

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