Part 17

That Ring Lardner and Mr Dooley in their best work are more entertaining and more important than James B. Cabell and Joseph Hergesheimer in their best;

That the daily comic strip of George Herriman (Krazy Kat) is easily the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America to-day;

That Florenz Ziegfeld is a better producer than David Belasco;

That one film by Mack Sennett or Charlie Chaplin is worth the entire _œuvre_ of Cecil de Mille;

That _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and _I Love a Piano_ are musically and emotionally sounder pieces of work than _Indian Love Lyrics_ and _The Rosary_;

That the circus can be and often is more artistic than the Metropolitan Opera House in New York;

That Irene Castle is worth all the pseudo-classic dancing ever seen on the American stage; and

That the civic masque is not perceptibly superior to the Elks’ Parade in Atlantic City.

Only about half of these are heresies, and I am quite ready to stand by them as I would stand by my opinion of Dean Swift or Picasso or Henry James or James Joyce or Johann Sebastian Bach. But I recognize that they are expressions of personal preference, and possibly valueless unless related to some general principles. It appears that what I care for in the catalogue above falls in the field of the lively arts; and that the things to which I compare them (for emphasis, not for measurement) are either second-rate instances of the major arts or first-rate examples of the peculiarly disagreeable thing for which I find no other name than the bogus. I shall arrive presently at the general principles of the lively arts and their relation to the major. The bogus is a lion in the path.

Bogus is counterfeit and counterfeit is bad money and bad money is better--or at least more effective--than good money. This is not a private paradox, but a plain statement of a law in economics (Gresham’s, I think) that unless it is discovered, bad money will drive out good. Another characteristic of counterfeit is that, once we have accepted it, we try to pass it off on some one else; banks and critics are the only institutions which don’t--or ought not to--continue the circulation. In the arts counterfeit is known as _faux bon_--the apparently good, essentially bad, which is the enemy of the good. The existence of the bogus is not a serious threat against the great arts, for they have an obstinate vitality and in the end--but only in the end--they prevail. It is the lively arts which are continually jeopardized by the bogus, and it is for their sake that I should like to see the bogus go sullenly down into oblivion.

Namely: vocal concerts, pseudo-classic dancing, the serious intellectual drama, the civic masque, the high-toned moving picture, and grand opera.

The first thing about them is that a very small percentage of those who make the bogus arts prosperous really enjoy them. I recall my own complete stultification after hearing my first concert; and the casual way in which I made it evident to all my companions that I had been to a concert is my only clue to the mystery. For at bottom there is a vast snobbery of the intellect which repays the deadly hours of boredom we spend in the pursuit of art. We are the inheritors of a tradition that what is worth while must be dull; and as often as not we invert the maxim and pretend that what is dull is higher in quality, more serious, “greater art” in short than whatever is light and easy and gay. We suffer fools gladly if we can pretend they are mystics. And the fact that audiences at concerts and opera, spectators at classic dances and masques, are suffering, is the final damnation, for it means that these arts are failures. I do not found my belief on any theory that all the arts ought to be appreciated by all the people. I do mean that most of those who read _Ulysses_ or _The Pickwick Papers_ do so because they enjoy it, and they stop the moment they are bored. There is no superiority in having read a book. The lively anticipation of delights which one senses in those going to the _Follies_ or to a circus is wholly absent in the lobby of the Metropolitan or at a performance of _Jane Clegg_. And the art which communicates no ecstasy but that of snobbism is irretrievably bogus.

There is something hopeless about opera as we know it in the United States; and the fact that ten or fifteen operas are among the permanent delights of civilized existence does not alter the fact. (Three of them: _Chovanstchina_, _The Marriage of Figaro_, and _Don Giovanni_, are not in the repertoire of the Metropolitan; nor are _Falstaff_ and _Otello_; nor does the ballet proceed beyond _Coq d’Or_; nor it seems would the Metropolitan hold it within its dignity to produce _The Mikado_, although Schumann-Heink was ready to sing Katisha.) Here is an art-form hundreds of years old, prospered by an enormous publicity, favoured by extraordinary windfalls--the voice of Caruso, the “personality” of Farrar--able to set into motion nearly every appeal to the senses in colour, tone, movement--it has song and action and dance--and what exactly is the final accomplishment? The pale maunderings of Puccini, the vulgarity of Massenet, and the overpowering dulness of our domestic try-outs. Wagner? A philosopher drunk with divine wisdom is reported (by Goethe) to have cried out that he could discern shortcomings even in God; and the melancholy truth is that the welding of three arts into one succeeded only in Wagner’s brain, for on the boards we lose Wagner as we attend to the stage, and regain him as we return to the music. This is not true of _Boris_ or of _Figaro_--so much less pretentious, both; and the director may arise who will know how to fuse Wagner into one harmonious and beautiful object. At the moment, one takes the Metropolitan with its vast seating capacity, its endless sources of appeal to the multitude, and one knows that it isn’t a success. If it isn’t losing money it is paying its way through social subventions. Eighty per cent of the music heard there is trivial in comparison with either good jazz or good symphonic music; ninety per cent of the acting is preposterous; and the settings, costumes, and properties are so far below popular musical comedy standards that in the end Urban and Norman-Bel Geddes have had to be called in to save them, and haven’t been given scope or freedom enough to succeed. The Metropolitan is, I am told, the finest opera house in the world and loses money because it is still several leaps ahead of its clientèle which insists on more Puccini and no _Coq d’Or_. Also I have had the supreme pleasure of hearing Chaliapin there and I am not ungrateful. The Metropolitan has difficulties happily unknown to us and is unquestionably an eminent institution. It is opera as we know it, that calls down the curse, opera which has to call itself “grand” to distinguish itself from the popular, superior, kind. For it is pretentious and it appeals not to our sensibilities but to our snobbery. It neither excites nor exalts; it does not amuse. Over it and under it and through it runs the element of fake; it is a substitute for symphonic music and an easy expiatory offering for ragtime. _Ecrasez l’infâme!_

Audiences at the opera have, however, been thrilled by a voice. What is there to say for the uncommunicative, uninspired, serious-minded intellectual drama which without wit, or intensity, “presents a problem” or drearily holds the mirror up to nature? Those little scenes from domestic life, those second-hand expositions of other people’s philosophies, those unflinching grapplings with “the vital facts of existence” which year by year are held to be great plays? Let me be frank; let me face my vital facts. I have never found my brain inadequate to grapple with their grapplings, for it is almost in the nature of the case that if a man has anything profound to express he will flee from the theatre where everything is dependent upon actors usually unintelligent and is reduced to the lowest common factor of human intelligence. Bernard Shaw writes his ideas into his prefaces because they can’t be fully stated on the stage; Henry James tried to be delicate and failed. It remains for Ferencz Molnar and Augustus Thomas to succeed--with borrowed and diminished ideas. Still speaking of modern serious plays (because the _Medea_ of Euripides and the tragedy of _Othello_ are not involved) what is bogus in them is their spurious appeal to our sentimentality or our snobbery. It is their pretence to be a great and serious art when they are simply vulgarizations. I have no quarrel with any man for the subject matter of his work of art, and I should allow every freedom to the artist. The whole trouble with our modern serious drama is that it is usually such bad drama; the tedium of three hours of _Jane Clegg_ isn’t worthy sitting through because of the desperate effort of the dramatist and the producer to create the illusion of reality by reproducing the rhythm of reality. The essential distortion, caricature, or transposition which you find in a serious work of art or in a vaudeville sketch, is missing here. And the efforts to ram this sort of play home by pretending that only morons do not like it is exactly and precisely bunk. Most plays fail because they are bad plays; and the greater part of the intellectual drama following this divine LAW, fails. A good manipulator of the theatre like Molnar can put over _Liliom_, which has no more of a great idea than _Seven Keys to Baldpate_ and is almost as good drama, if he knows in what proportion to mingle his approaches to our meaner and higher sensibilities. For we are not altogether lost yet.

If the civic masque and classic dancing continue much longer we will be lost entirely. These arty conglomerations of middle-high seriousness and bourgeois beauty are not so much a peril as a nuisance. The former is the “artistic” counterpart of the Elks Parade and since I cannot speak with decent calm about its draperies and mummery, I recommend Mr R. C. Benchley’s chapter on the same subject in _Of All Things!_ The civic masque is fake mediævalism, the sort of thing which, if ridicule could kill, should have gone out after W. S. Gilbert’s couplets appeared in _Patience_. Alas the instinct for trumpery art persists and on it has been grafted the astounding idea of communal artistic effort--a characteristic thing, too, for the communal efforts of ancient Greece were war and Bacchanalia, and of the middle ages, the crusades; the municipal celebrations after which the civic masque is patterned were created in cities which were unself-conscious and were doing something out of vanity and joy. I cannot imagine the six million of New York or the six thousand of Vineland, Arkansas, growing suddenly mad with joy over the fact that they live in no mean city. I neither like the civic consciousness nor believe deeply in its honest existence. And when it takes to expressing itself as the symbol of the corn and such-like idiocy it isn’t as funny as the induction scene of the Ziegfeld Follies (which the Forty-niners took off as “I am the spirit of Public School Number 146”) and it isn’t any more moving or intelligent. Certainly it has never been so beautiful. Faced with the vast myths of the American pasts, our poets simply haven’t found the medium for projecting them. The dime novel and the Wild West film both failed for lack of imaginative power, and that treasure remains undisturbed. It is sealed and guarded and the civic masque nibbles at it, dislodges a fragment, and comes dancing awkwardly into the foreground waving the shadow of an illusion like a scarf over its head.

For obviously classic dancing is the natural form of expression for this pseudo-civism. I have never had the patience to discover the beginnings of the fatuous craze for imitations of presumably ancient dances. Certainly the first of the notable dancers I saw was not before 1907--in the person of Isadora Duncan. It would be absurd to recall those renditions of the _Seventh Symphony_ and what not at this date. If Miss Duncan is a great artist and a great personality now, so much the better, for her early success had much to do with breaking down the gates of our decent objection to fake and her imitators swept over us like a flood. Bogus again, these things; they interpret in dance things which had already been all too clear in music or drama. They know, it seems, the science of eurhythmics, which ought to mean good rhythm, and they employ it to produce in pantomime an obvious, brutally flat version of the Fall of Troy. They haven’t as yet added one single thing to our stock of interest and beauty--as the Russian Ballet did, as the old five-position ballet dance did, as modern ballroom and stage dancing does. The costuming is almost always silly; the music chosen is almost always obvious; and the postures assumed are lethally monotonous. The old ballet, based on five definite positions, made each slight variation count, and Pavlowa with her stricken face and tenderness of movement knew it by heart, or by instinct. The new dancers have no internal discipline and no freedom; and only the accident that the human body is at times not displeasing to look upon makes them tolerable. One could forgive them much if the pretensions were not so unutterably lofty and the swank so ignorant and the results so ugly. Fat women leaping with chaplets in their hair, in garments of grey gauze, are not the poetry of motion, and Irene Castle in a black evening dress dancing Irving Berlin’s music is--just as surely as Nijinsky was. What is more, these two dancers, whom I choose at the extremes of the dance, both have reference to our contemporary life; and the classic dancing of Helen Moeller and Marion Morgan and Mr Chalif and the rest have absolutely nothing to say to us. We’ve lost that “simplicity,” thank God, or haven’t found it yet. We are an alert and lively people--and our dance must actually express that spirit as no fake can do.

Our existence is hard, precise, high spirited. There is no nourishment for us in the milk-and-water diet of the bogus arts, and all they accomplish is a genteel corruption, a further thinning out of the blood, a little extra refinement. They are, intellectually, the exact equivalent of a high-toned lady, an elegant dinner or a refined collation served in the saloon, and the contemporary form of the vapours. Everything about them is supposed to be “good taste,” including the kiss on the brow which miraculously “ruins” a perfect virgin--and they are in the physical sense of the word utterly tasteless. The great arts and the lively arts have their sources in strength or in gaiety--and the difference between them is not the degree of intensity, but the degree of intellect. But the bogus arts spring from longing and weakness and depression.[27] A happy people creates folk songs or whistles rag; it does not commit the vast atrocity of a “community sing-song”; it goes to Olympic games or to a race track, to _Iphigenia_ or to Charlie Chaplin--not to hear a “vocal concert.”

The bogus arts are corrupting the lively ones--because an essential defect of the bogus is that they pretend to be better than the popular arts, yet they want desperately to be popular. They borrow and spoil what is good; they persuade people by appealing to their snobbery that they are the real thing. And as the audience watches these arts in action the comforting illusion creeps over them that at last they have achieved art. But they are really watching the manifestations of the Great God Bogus--and what annoys me most is that they might at that very moment be hailing Apollo or Dionysos, or be themselves participating in some of the minor rites of the Great God Pan.

_An Open Letter to the Movie Magnates_

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOVIE MAGNATES

IGNORANT AND UNHAPPY PEOPLE:

The Lord has brought you into a narrow place--what you would call a tight corner--and you are beginning to feel the pressure. A voice is heard in the land saying that your day is over. The name of the voice is Radio, broadcasting nightly to announce that the unequal struggle between the tired washerwoman and the captions written by or for Mr Griffith is ended. It is easier to listen than to read. And it is long since you have given us anything significant to see.

You may say that radio will ruin the movies no more than the movies ruined the theatre. The difference is that your foundation is insecure: you are monstrously over-capitalized and monstrously undereducated; the one thing you cannot stand is a series of lean years. You have to keep on going because you have from the beginning considered the pictures as a business, not as an entertainment. Perhaps in your desperate straits you will for the first time try to think about the movie, to see it steadily and see it whole.

My suggestion to you is that you engage a number of men and women: an archæologist to unearth the history of the moving picture; a mechanical genius to explain the camera and the projector to you; a typical movie fan, if you can find one; and above all a man of no practical capacity whatever: a theorist. Let these people get to work for you; do what they tell you to do. You will hardly lose more money than in any other case.

If the historian tells you that the pictures you produced in 1910 were better than those you now lose money on, he is worthless to you. But if he fails to tell you that the pictures of 1910 pointed the way to the real right thing and that you have since departed from that way, discharge him as a fool. For that is exactly what has occurred. In your beginnings you were on the right track; I believe that in those days you still looked at the screen. Ten years later you were too busy looking at, or after, your bank account. Remember that ten years ago there wasn’t a great name in the movies. And then, thinking of your present plight, recall that you deliberately introduced great names and chose Sir Gilbert Parker, Rupert Hughes, and Mrs Elinor Glyn. If I may quote an author you haven’t filmed, it shall not be forgiven you.

Your historian ought to tell you that the moving picture came into being as the result of a series of mechanical developments; your technician will add the details about the camera and projector. From both you will learn that you are dealing with _movement governed by light_. It will be news to you. You seem not to realize the simplest thing about your business. Further, you will learn that everything you need to do _must_ be by these two agencies: movement and light. (Counting in movement everything of pace and in light everything which light can make visible to the eye, even if it be an emotion: do you recall the unnatural splash of white in a street scene in _Caligari_?) It will occur to you that the cut-back, the alternating exposition of two concurrent actions, the vision, the dream, are all good; and that the close-up, dearest of all your finds, usually dissociates a face or an object from its moving background and is the most dangerous of expedients. You will learn much from the camera and from what was done with it in the early days.

I warn you again they were not great pictures except for _The Avenging Conscience_ and--one you didn’t make--_Cabiria_. To each of these a poet contributed. (Peace, Mr Griffith; the poet in your case was E. A. Poe; and the warrior poet of Fiume contributed the scenario for the second.) Mr Griffith contrived in his picture to project both beauty and terror by combining _Annabel Lee_ with _The Telltale Heart_. A sure instinct led him to disengage the vast emotion of longing and of lost love through an _action_ of mystery and terror. (I think he made a happy ending somehow--by having the central portion of his story appear as a dream. How little it mattered since the _real_ emotion came through the story.) The picture was projected in a palpable atmosphere; it was _felt_. After ten years I recall dark masses and ghostly rays of light. And if I may anticipate the end, let me compare it with a picture of 1922, a picturization as you call it, of Annabel Lee. It was all scenery and captions; it presented a detestable little boy and a pretty little girl doing æsthetic dancing along cliffs by the sea; one almost saw the Ocean View Hotel in the background. Mercilessly the stanzas appeared on the screen; but nothing was allowed to _happen_ except a vulgar representation of calf love. I cannot bear to describe the disagreeable picture of grief at the end; I do not dare to think what you may now be preparing with a really great poem. The lesson is not merely one of taste; it is a question of knowing the camera, of realizing that you _must_ project emotion by movement and by picture combined.

I am trying to trace for you the development of the serious moving picture as a _bogus_ art, and I can’t do better than assure you that it was best before it was an “art” at all. (Or I can indicate that slap-stick comedy, which you despise, is not bogus, is a real, and valuable, and delightful entertainment.) I believe that you went out West because the perpetual sun of southern California made taking easy; there you discovered the lost romance of America, its Wild West and its pioneer days, its gold rush and its Indians. You had it in your hands, then, to make that past of ours alive; a small written literature and a remnant of oral tradition remained for you to work on. On the whole you did make a good beginning. You missed fine things, but you caught the simple ones; you presented the material directly, with appropriate sentiment. You relied on melodrama, which was the rightest thing you ever did. Combat and pursuit, the last-minute rescue, were the three items of your best pictures; and your cutting department, carefully alternating the fight between white men and red with the slow-starting, distant, approaching, arriving, victorious troops from the garrison appealed properly to our soundest instincts. You went into the bad-man period; you began to make an individual soldier, Indian, bandit, pioneer, renegade, the focus of your interest: still good because you related him to an active, living background. Dear Heaven! before you had filmed Bret Harte you had created legendary heroes of your own.

Meanwhile Mr Griffith, apparently insatiable, was developing small _genre_ scenes of slum life while he thought of filming the tragic history of the South after the war. Other directors sought other fields--notably that of the serial adventure film. Since they made money for all concerned, you will not be surprised to hear these serials praised: _The Exploits of Elaine_, the whole Pearl White adventure, the thirty minutes of action closing on an impossible and unresolved climax were, of course, infinitely better pictures than your version of Mr Joseph Conrad’s _Victory_, your _Humoreske_, your _Should a Wife Forgive_?[28] They were extremely silly; they worked too closely on a scheme: getting out of last week’s predicament and into next week’s can hardly be called a “form.” But within their limitations they used the camera for all it was worth. It didn’t matter a bit that the perils were preposterous, that the flights and pursuits were all fakes composed by the speed of the projector. You were back in the days of Nick Carter and the Liberty Boys; you hadn’t heard of psychology, and drama, and art; you were developing the camera. You bored us when your effects didn’t come off and I’m afraid amused us a little even when they did. But you were on the right road.