Part 15
Had I had any doubts about vaudeville as we practice it in the United States they would have been dispelled in the past two years by one great success and one notable failure: the _Chauve-Souris_ of Balieff and the show of the Forty-niners. Balieff seemed for a moment to be destroying B. F. Keith; here was something certainly vaudeville, with turns and numbers, appealing to every grade of intelligence; here were good music, exciting scenery, and good fun; here were voices caressing the ear and dancers dazzling the eye; here was a gay burlesque and a sophisticated _conférencier_. Now if our native product were only like that ... (the implication was, Wouldn’t we just go every day to the nearest vaudeville house!). Then, to be sure, a reaction. Put Ed Wynn and Leon Errol and ... I omit the list--Wynn was almost unanimously chosen as _conférencier_--and we could give the Russians at least a good run for the money--and it _was_ money, loads of it, much to their surprise. And then, without Ed Wynn and the list, the attempt; for the Forty-niners were cheerfully setting out to be a company of Americans stranded in Russia, giving the Russians to understand what the folk and popular arts of America were. Months earlier the thing had been perfectly done, as a game, in the _No-Siree_, a wholly amateur single performance which was without doubt the gayest evening of the year in New York. (The tribute is not exactly wrung from me, for friends of mine were concerned in it; it was the high moment of the Algonquin Circle and they should have disbanded the following morning. Since I was not an adherent of the group, my advice was not asked; I do not know whether it still exists, has passed to further triumphs, or has repeated the Forty-niners.) Put on professionally, high class vaudeville showed all the weaknesses of the commercial kind, and had a dulness of its own. The Dance of the Small-town Mayors was exactly right, but most of the parodies were outdated, the burlesques were too _voulus_, the strain too great. There was lacking that technical proficiency which is essential to vaudeville, and the adjustment of means to material was sloppy. One fell back on Balieff and discovered, as the exoticism wore off, that he too had his weak points. Sentimental songs in however beautiful voices, the choreographics of figures come to life from Copenhagen plate however accurately the footfall coincided with Anitra’s Dance, and a number of other things suggested that in Russia, too, refinement could corrupt and stultify. There remained elements we could not match: we hadn’t encouraged our legitimate stage sufficiently to be justified in expecting cubist settings in vaudeville; nor when we heard American folk music (and its contemporary form in ragtime) did we so earnestly applaud as to keep them fresh in variety shows. Balieff never was “variety,” and we asked of variety that it be like him; we missed the meaning of Balieff as surely as we appreciated the fun. For he was a lesson not to vaudeville, but to us, to those of us who left vaudeville in the hands of the least cultivated audiences. We have asked nothing of vaudeville simply because we haven’t suspected what it had to give. Yet week after week at the Palace Theatre in New York there have been bills equal in entertainment to the average Balieff programme; there has been evident an expertness in technique, a skill in construction, a naturalness of execution, a soundness of sense and judgement, which ought to have appealed to all who had taste and discrimination. The people who do go there have something, at least; and lack snobbism generally. If the audiences of the Theatre Guild and the Neighborhood Playhouse were to add themselves to their number, were to accept what is given and be receptive to something more, it could not hurt vaudeville. Because like everything else variety must grow, and there is no reason why it should shut itself off from the direction of civilized life. It can exist very well without the Theatre Guild audience; I wonder whether that audience can exist as well without variety.
_They Call It Dancing_
THEY CALL IT DANCING
One of the most tiresome of contemporary intellectual sentimentalities is the cult of “the dance”--a cult which has almost nothing in the world to do with dancing. “The dance” is “art”; dancing is a form of popular entertainment, one of the very few which can be practised by its admirers. It is also one of the arts which can be “polite” without danger of atrophy, the danger in this case being that the technical refinement may eventually make dancing a trick, a rather graceful sort of juggling.
In any case, we shall not have in America anything corresponding to folk dances; the ritual dance, the dance as religion, simply isn’t our type, and none of the tentatives in favour of that kind of dancing has made me regret our natural bent toward ballroom and stunt dancing as a mode of expression. In the rue Lappe in Paris nearly every other house is a _Bal Musette_ and in all but one of these dance halls the floor is taken by men and women of that quarter, working men and women who come in and dance and pay a few _sous_ for each dance. They do this every night and enjoy it; they enjoy the sometimes wheezing accordeon and the bells which, on the right ankle of the player, accentuate the beat. They dance waltzes and polkas and, since the Java is forbidden, the mazurka. Once I saw two couples rise and dance the _bourrée_, presumably as it was danced in their native province of Auvergne; it is possible to see other provincial dances of France, as they are remembered, in the Bal Musette of this district and elsewhere--occasionally and not by pre-arrangement. The ancient dances of America haven’t such roots, nor such vitality; and we may have to become much more simple, or much more sophisticated, before we will proceed naturally to buck-and-wing and cakewalk and the ordinary breakdown on the floor of the Palais Royal. There are Kentucky mountain and cowboy dances which the moving picture inadequately reconstructs, and I am afraid that even negro levee dancing has lost much of its own character in the process of influencing the steps of the ordinary American dance. Undoubtedly those who can should preserve these provincial and rooted dances; but it is idle to pretend that dancing itself can be a subject for archæology. It is essentially for action, not for speculation.
I do not belittle dancing when I attempt to deprive it of the cachet of “Art.” Nothing so precise, so graceful, so implicated with music, can escape being artistic; in the hands of its masters it becomes an intuitive creative process, but this happens most frequently when the dancer gives himself to the music and seldom when he tries to interpret the music. From the waltz to the tango, from the tango to the current fox-trot or one-step, polite dancing has held more of what is essentially artistic than the art-dance, and it has had no pretensions. The old tango and the maxixe were the only ones which could not easily be danced by those who applauded them on the stage; classic dancing, on the contrary, has always been an art of professionals--almost a contradiction in terms in this case, for it is the essence of the dance that it can be danced. It is not the essence of the dance that it can be staged, or made into a pantomime. The Russian Ballet has no reference to the subject for it is essentially the work of mimes and the dancing is either folk dance or choreography.
The reason politeness is not fatal to the dance is that there is only one standard of vulgarity in dancing, which is ugliness. Vulgarity means actively disagreeable postures and steps not exceptionally adapted to the music. The relation of the dancers to one another is the basis of their relation to the music, and that is why the shimmy has little to do with dancing, whereas the cheek-to-cheek position--the _bête-noire_ of chaperons a few weeks, or is it years, ago?--is fundamentally not objectionable, since it brings two dancers to as near a unit, with the same centre of gravity, as the dance requires. One doesn’t dance the fox-trot as one danced the Virginia reel, and the question of morals has little to do with the case. The “indecencies” of the turkey-trot, as we used to phrase it, disappeared not because we are better men and women, but because we are dancing more beautifully.
Two influences have worked to accomplish this. One is that our music has become more interesting and is written specifically to be danced, as the waltz-song always was and as our older ragtime was not. The other is the effect of the stage (through which we have, recently, learned a vast amount from negro dancing, an active influence for the last fifteen years at least, touching the dance at every point in music, and tending always to prevent the American dance from becoming cold and formal.) Dancing masters go to the stage to perform the dances they have elaborated in their studios; from the stage the dance is adapted to the floor. This is what makes it so unnerving to go through a year seeing nothing but men jumping over their own ankles, or to witness Carl Randall dancing himself into his evening clothes. One doesn’t know how soon one will be called upon to do the same sort of thing in the semi-privacy of the night club. Acrobatic dancing is interesting as all acrobatics are--brutally for the stunt and æsthetically for the picture formed while doing the trick. The dancing of choruses has something of the same interest. The Tiller or Palace Girls do very little that would merit attention if done by one of them; done by sixteen, it is entertaining; so are the ranks of heads appearing over the top step of the Hippodrome or at the New Amsterdam, and the ranks of knees rhythmically bending as row follows row down the stairs. But none of these affect actual dancing appreciably.
Acrobatic or stunt dancing has a tendency to corrupt good exhibition dancing--the desire to do something obviously difficult displaces the more estimable desire to do something beautiful. Yet some of our best stunt dancers can and do combine all the elements and to watch them is to experience a double delight. George M. Cohan always danced interestingly; he has sardonic legs and he is, I suppose, the repository of all the knowledge we have of the 1890–1910 dance. Frisco took up the same work near the place where Cohan dropped it; he is (but where I do not know) a character dancer with a specific sense of jazz, and was, for a moment, the symbolic figure of what was coming. His eccentricities were premature, his comparative disappearance unmerited. Eccentric also, and not chiefly dancers, are Leon Errol and Jimmy Barton. Eccentric and essentially a dancer is the fine comic Johnny Dooley. The difference is that almost all of Dooley’s comedy is _in_ his dancing, whereas the others are great comedians and their dances are also funny. It seems to be Dooley’s natural mode to walk on the side of his feet and to catch a broken, wholly American rhythm in every movement--to create dances, therefore, which are untouched by the Russian Ballet and other trepaks and hazzazzas. The foreign influence has touched Carl Randall, a gain in expertness, a loss in freshness. There seems to be nothing he cannot do, nothing he doesn’t do well, nothing he does superbly.
The dancing team which ought to have been the best of our time and wasn’t is that of Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian.[21] The suppleness of Miss Sanderson’s body, the breathless sway of the torso on the hips, the suggestion of languor in the most rapid of her movements, are not to be equalled; and Brian was always smart, decisive, accurate. It is difficult to define the defect which was always in their work; probably a reserve, a not giving themselves away to the music, a shade too much of the stiffness which dancing requires. Miss Sanderson gets along quite well without the lyric knees (as they were--one doesn’t see them now) of Ann Pennington; nor has she the exceptional height which makes the grace of Jessica Brown so surprising and her curve of beauty so exceptional. Miss Brown, I take it, is one of the best dancers of the stage, and, unlike Charlotte Greenwood, has nothing to do with grotesque. Miss Greenwood makes a virtue of her defect--the longest limbs in the world. Miss Brown is unconscious of hers as defects at all; like most people’s, her legs are long enough to reach the ground. It is marvellous to see what she can do when she lifts them off the ground.
I choose these names as examples, fully aware that I may be omitting others equally famous. But what remains is deliberate: two groups of dancers who were at the very top, I think, of their profession, of their art. Of Doyle and Dixon only Harland Dixon is now visible; the team is broken, but Dixon continues to be a wonderful dancer, in the tradition rather of Fred Stone, and with recent leanings toward acting. It was 1915 or so when I saw them dance Irving Berlin’s _Ragtime Melodrama_, and although I have never seen that equalled, I have never seen the team or Dixon alone dance anything unworthy of that piece. It was a beautiful duo, perfectly cadenced, creating long grateful lines around the stage; it was full of tricks and fun and character. And gradually the duo resolved itself into feats of individual prowess, in which Dixon slowly surpassed his partner and became a miracle of acrobatics in rhythm. He is agile, never jerky, with a nice sense of syncopation; he requires Berlin rather than Kern for his full value.
Kern gives all (and more) that Maurice can require, and whether with Florence Walton or Leonora Hughes the dancing of Maurice is always icily regular, and nearly null. His type of mechanism is exactly wrong and he sets off in bold relief the accuracy, the inspired rightness of Irene and Vernon Castle. That these two, years ago, determined the course dancing should take is incontestable. They were decisive characters, like Boileau in French poetry and Berlin in ragtime; for they understood, absorbed, and transformed everything known of dancing up to that time and out of it made something beautiful and new. Vernon Castle, it is possible, was the better dancer of the two; in addition to the beauty of his dancing he had inventiveness, he anticipated things of 1923 with his rigid body and his evolutions on his heel; but if he were the greater, his finest creation was Irene.
No one else has ever given exactly that sense of being freely perfect, of moving without effort and without will, in more than accord, in absolute identity with music. There was always something unimpassioned, cool not cold, in her abandon; it was certainly the least sensual dancing in the world; the whole appeal was visual. It was as if the eye following her graceful motion across a stage was gratified by its own orbit, and found a sensuous pleasure in the ease of her line, in the disembodied lightness of her footfall, in the careless slope of her lovely shoulders. It was not--it seemed not to be--intelligent dancing; however trained, it was still intuitive. She danced from her shoulders down, the straight scapular supports of her head were at the same time the balances on which her exquisitely poised body depended. There were no steps, no tricks, no stunts. There was only dancing, and it was all that one ever dreamed of flight, with wings poised, and swooping gently down to rest. I put it in the past, I hardly know why; unless because it is too good to last.
_St Simeon Stylites_
ST SIMEON STYLITES
The most sophisticated of the minor arts in America is that of the colyumist. It is, except for occasional lapses into the usual journalistic disrespect for privacy, a decent art, and if it never rises to the polish and wit of such an outstanding colyumist as La-Fourchardière of _l’Œuvre_, it never sinks to the pretentious pseudo-intelligent vulgarity of the English counterpart. The colyumist is, to begin with, a newspaper humorist, and there are times, when questions of art and letters are discussed, when one wishes he had remained one. Phillips, who is now with the _Sun and Globe_ in New York, sticks to his game manfully; he tells nothing about himself, discusses no plays, and his colyum, which he illustrates with grotesque little drawings, is self-contained. You do not have to be in the secret to read him. His usual manner is to take a notable or obscure item of news and play with it, in the manner of Mark Twain. When Ambassador Harvey made a speech on the topic, “Have Women Souls”? Phillips reported the proceedings and the aftermath:
“Latest bulletins from Europe and Asia on the conduct of other American diplomats follow:
“Warren G. Harding, President, United States:
Excellency:--
American ambassador here has brought about grave crisis by speech, “Are Bananas a Fruit or a Flower?” and “Can Fresh Roasted Peanuts Think?” Understand he has stated publicly his opinion that John McCormack is greater singer than Caruso. People are near uprising. Will you recall him or shall we give him the bum’s rush?
KING OF ITALY.
and so on.
It is horseplay; but when he is in form it achieves a wild carelessness and gaiety which the intellectual colyumist entirely forswears. He has for compeer Arthur “Bugs” Baer, by all odds the funniest of the colyumists and a too-much-neglected creator of American humour. There is, also, a considerable number of colyumists of the Phillips type in other cities. I make no apology for not knowing them, for a colyum correctly conceived is written for the readers of its paper. It ought to be partly private, and wholly provincial. Even Mencken when he ran the colyum of the Baltimore _Sun_, and gathered much material for _The American Language_, and told of each new consignment of German beer after the blockade began in 1915, even he was not all things to all men.
The last man who kept his colyum balanced between the high and low comic touch was Bert Leston Taylor. He was a very wise and humane person, wise and humane enough to appreciate and to publish fun of a sort differing by much from the humour he created. There was something unnervingly oblique in his vision of the world, perfectly illustrated by the captions he wrote for clippings from rustic journals. He would take an item, “Our popular telegraphist Frank Dane had a son presented to him last week. Frank says he is going to stay home nights hereafter,” and write over it, “How the Days Are Drawing In.” There was nothing incongruous in the appearance side by side of his own expert parodies and the horseplay humour of some of his contributors. Taylor’s touch made everything light, everything right. In his house there were indeed many mansions. After him--before his death even--the colyumists divided and went separate ways. The Chicago _Tribune_ continues the Field-Taylor tradition indifferently well. Riq of the Chicago _Evening Post_ comes near the golden mean, but his own character as a colyumist is jeopardized by his contributors; when he gets a good theme--such as the necessity for keeping the seam of a stocking straight, he can be counted on. Calverley indicated his difficulty--or almost: Themes are so scarce in this world of ours.
The colyumists are sophisticated, or _faux-naïfs_, or actually _naïf_. Of the first, F. P. A. of the New York _World_ is the most notable and Baird Leonard of the _Morning Telegraph_ the best. F. P. A. has all the virtues of the colyumist in the highest degree; unfortunately he has almost all the faults, in nearly the same measure. He is a defeated Calverley, writing the best light verse in America, and the best parodies in verse. His Persicos Odi, one of several (published in the quarterly “1910”), seems to me better than Field’s--which had the lines, “And as for roses, Holy Moses, they can’t be got at living prices.” Adams’, as I recall it, ran:
The pomp of the Persian I hold in aversion; I hate all their gingerbread tricks; Their garlicky wreathings and lindeny tree-things Nix. Boy, us for plain myrtle while under this fertile Old grapevine myself I protrude For your old bibacious Quintus Horatius Stewed.
and his treatment of the same poem according to Service is perfect parody. Algernon St. John Brenon used to quarrel magisterially with Adams about Latin quantities, but he could never undermine Adams’ feeling for the ease and urbanity of Horace--and Adams isn’t in the business of preserving the tradition of dignity.
His trick verse is not exceptional; he has no Dobsonian feeling for form; in prose parody he is a duffer. His own prose has the one essential quality for wit--it is not diffuse.[22] His actual character is that of a civilized man who cannot be imposed upon by the bunk, and as he is fairly independent he recognizes fake--in the world of politics, business, and society--wherever it occurs. This is what prevents him from being a good radical (type: Heywood Broun; other things in his nature keep him from the insolence of martyrdom), and what makes his work sympathetic to mature and disillusioned minds. His exceptional good sense--he seems to have no sensibility--makes stupidity an irritation to him; he follows half of the biblical precept and does not suffer fools gladly. The habit of pontificating has grown on him, and from expressing himself with justifiable arrogance on minor matters he has proceeded to speak with assurance on manners, art, and letters. It would be more accurate to say that he speaks without the humility becoming to one who for many months boosted W. B. Maxwell in opposition to Joseph Conrad. He hasn’t, essentially, any idea of his great influence; for if he knew that a vast number of semi-intelligent people were guided by him he would not so rapidly praise and damn (or praise with faint damns, if I may quote another colyum). He is the most exasperating of colyumists; and his triviality when confronted by things he does not understand--I am thinking of his comment on _The Waste Land_--is appalling. Yet this same quality is what makes him precious; he is a gadfly to an exceptionally sluggish beast--the New York intellectual. He has, inevitably, become the patron saint of the smart. At any rate, he has done something to destroy the tradition that what is witty is unsound. It is only when he is serious that he becomes a little ridiculous.
I quarrel as much with Baird Leonard’s judgement on art and letters, but I am not irritated because Miss Leonard (who writes for a paper devoted to horse-racing and the theatre) is almost always willing to indicate the path by which she arrives at her discriminations. She hasn’t F. P. A.’s weak fear of the common, and her own mind is as far removed as his from the commonplace, it has movements of grace and lightness, and her humour is smooth and wholly urban. Too often for me she fills her column with Bridge Table Talk, a sardonic report of fake intellectualism done with vigour and ferocity, but hampered by the framework which is not adaptable. I do not, at this moment, recall a line she has written; I recall the tone of her whole work--it is unaffected, not self-conscious, brightly aware of everything, keen and curious and always on the alert. If the stage were what it seems from out in front, Miss Leonard would be well placed on a theatrical paper. She is writing for people wise enough to know the place of wit. Adams, I fear, is beginning to write for people witty enough (and no more) to despise wisdom.