Seeing Things At Night Part 20

It must be that all this sort of life has been going on for some time, but naturally during the war when the Hun was at the gate it would hardly have been patriotic to talk about it. Now that it's all among friends we can talk about our morals and habits and they seem to range from none to appalling. I can't testify completely to the state of affairs reported upon by the novelists, because I have spent a good deal of time recently in the theater and it is only fair to say that there, at any rate, peach jam and country air still combine to reform city dwellers, and people get married and live happily ever after, and some of them dance and sing and make jokes, and, of course, sunlight and moonlight and pink dresses and green ones and gold and silver ones, too, abound. My aunt says that this is just as it should be. "There's so much unhappiness in the world," she says, "that why should we pay money to see shows and read books that help to remind us about it. The man worth while," she says, "is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong."

Practically all the shows in town seem to have been written to please my aunt, but I don't agree with her at all. As a matter of fact, she lives in Pelham and has never heard of Freud or Jung. I tried to convince her once that practically all of what we call the civilized world is inhibited, and she interrupted to say that the last Sat.u.r.day night lecturer told them the same thing about Mars. Perhaps it will be just as well to leave my aunt out of the story at this point and go on to explain why the modern novel is more stimulating and encouraging to the ego than the modern play.

First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel or a play or any form of art is what we call an escape. To be sure, a good many plays of the year are not calculated to give anybody much of a start on the bloodhounds, but you understand what I mean. Take, for instance, the most humdrum person of your acquaintance and you will probably find that he is an inveterate patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in the moonlight and seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over gates. He himself will never be in the moonlight to any serious extent and he will jump no gates. The moving pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic cravings.

The man in the theater or the man who reads a book identifies himself with one of the characters, hero or villain as the case may be, and while the spell is on he lives the life of the fictional character. Next morning he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An interesting thesis might be written on the question of just what bearing the eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon the falling marriage rate in the United States, but that would require a great many statistics and a knowledge of cube root.

a.s.suming then that art,--and for the purposes of this argument moving pictures and crook plays will be included under that heading,--takes the place of life for a great many people, what do we find about the pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the community in general? Simply that the man who is addicted to seeing plays and reading books in which everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even going to the trouble of doing so much as one good deed a day on his own account.

The man who went with me to see _Daddies_ a couple of seasons ago glowed with as complete a spirit of self-sacrifice as I have ever seen during all three acts of the play. He projected himself into the story and felt that he was actually patting little children on the head and adopting orphans and surprising them with Christmas gifts. On the way uptown he let me pay the fares and buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly impulses had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very cross and gloomy for the rest of the week.

Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my friend, I failed to make any complete identification with anybody on the stage, but I was also somewhat depressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of "the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me reflect on the imperfections of life. It did not seem to me at the time as if any of the children who live in the flat next door ever really tinkle. A week later I saw _Hamlet_ and the effect was diametrically opposite.

Everything in the play tended to make life seem more cheerful. He was too, too solid in flesh, also, and in many other respects he seemed ever so much worse off than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. And, goody, goody!

next week an Ibsen season begins!

It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is generally gloomy.

Ibsen understood the psychology of his countrymen. He lived in a land of long cold winters and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Norwegians would have gone home to die or to wish to die. Instead he gave them folk like Oswald, and all the Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as much as from cold. After seeing _Ghosts_ there is no place like home. I wish some of the Broadway dramatists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have plays in which n.o.body could raise the mortgage and the rent crisis in our own lives would seem less acute.

If the heroine were turned out into a driving snowstorm and stayed there, I might appreciate our janitor. And if the wild young men and the women who pay and pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of degradation, I know I could derive no little satisfaction from the knowledge that the elevator in our building runs until twelve o'clock on Sat.u.r.day nights.

Deburau

Theatergoers who have lived through two or more generations invariably complain that the stage isn't what it used to be. Mostly they mourn for a school of drama in which emotion flowered more luxuriantly than in the usual run of plays to-day about life in country stores and city flats.

The one thought in which these playgoers of another day take comfort is that even if we had such drama now there would be no one who could act it. But _Deburau_ is such a play, and Lionel Atwill must be some such one as those who figure in the speeches of our older friends when they say: "Ah, but then you never saw--". Sacha Guitry, who wrote _Deburau_, is alive; yes, indeed, even more than that, for he lives in Paris, and Lionel Atwill is a young actor whose greatest previous success in New York was achieved in the realistic drama of Ibsen. Now, it is possible for us to turn upon the elders and to say to them: "It is not for want of ability that this age of ours doesn't do your old-style plays. We could if we would. Go and see _Deburau_ and Lionel Atwill."

Of course, even in this verse play of the tragic life of a French actor of the early nineteenth century there are modern touches. For all the fact that Atwill is able to rise now and again to a carefully contrived situation and to develop it into a magnificent moment of ringing voice and sweeping gesture, he is also able to do the much greater and more exciting thing of making Deburau seem at times a man and not a great character in a play. He is able to make Deburau, actor, dead man, Frenchman, seem the common fellow of us all. And, still more wonderful, Lionel Atwill succeeds in doing this even in scenes during which the author is pitching rimed couplets around his neck as if he were no man at all, but nothing more than one of the posts in a game of quoits. I find it difficult to believe that anybody's heart is breaking when he expresses his emotion in carefully carpentered rhyme:

"_Trained in art from my cradle," did you say?

Well, I hadn't a cradle. But, anyway, If you bid me recall those things, here goes-- Though I've tried hard enough to forget them, G.o.d knows._

When people on the stage begin to speak in this fas.h.i.+on the persuasive air of reality is seldom present. It is with Atwill. He is careful not to accentuate the beat. Sometimes I am almost persuaded during his performance that it isn't poetry at all. When I watch him, verse is forgotten, but I have only to close my eyes to hear the deep and steady rumble of the beat which thumps beneath the play. Atwill is a man standing on top of a volcano. So great is his unconcern that you may accept it as extinct, but sooner or later you will know better, for by and by, with a terrifying roar, off goes the head of the mountain in an eruption of rhyme.

Atwill is not the only modern note in an old-fas.h.i.+oned play by a young man of to-day. Our forefathers may be speaking the truth when they tell us that in their day all the actors were nine or ten feet tall and spoke in voices slightly suggestive of Caruso at his best, but our forefathers never saw such a production as David Belasco has given to _Deburau_. No one knew in those days of the wonders which could be achieved with light. n.o.body, then, could have shown us in the twinkling of an eye the front of Deburau's tiny theater, then the interior of the theater itself, and finally, with only a pa.s.sing moment of darkness, carry the stage of the theater within a theater forward and set it down in front of the audience, greatly grown by its journey.

In Sacha Guitry's play about Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard Deburau we see this famous clown and pantomimist, who brought all Paris to his tiny theater some hundred years ago, in the midst of a performance. We hear the applause of his audience and then after a bit we see the man himself rid of his Pierrot garb and his white grease paint. He is introduced to us as an exceedingly modest young genius who deplores the fact that he has become hated by his fellow players because of the applause heaped upon him by the critics. Nor is he any better pleased when fair ladies wait to see him after a performance to press their attentions upon him. For them he has invented a formula of repulse. After a moment or so he produces a miniature from his pocket and remarks: "Pretty, isn't it?"

When the fair lady agrees he adds: "It's a picture of my wife. I should so like to have you meet her."

But one night Deburau meets a lady much fairer than any of the others, and this time he forgets to show her the miniature. In the second act we find that he is madly in love with her, while she, although she is touched by his devotion, has outgrown her fancy for the actor. It is Deburau who christens her "the lady with the camellias," for she is Marie Duplessis, better known to us as Camille. Returning home for the first time in a week, Deburau finds his wife has left him and, gathering up his bird, his dog, and his little son, he goes to the house of Marie, hoping there to find welcome and consolation. Instead he finds another lover, Armand Duval, who is to make Marie one of the great heroines of emotional drama.

Seven years pa.s.s before the next act begins, and now we find Deburau old, broken, and disheartened. He has left the theater and he lives tended only by his son, who has grown to be a lively youngster of seventeen. Somewhat to his chagrin, he finds that the boy is eager to become an actor, and this emotion changes to anger when he learns that his son has studied all his roles and hopes to make a debut in Paris simply as Deburau. He is not to be brushed aside in such cavalier fas.h.i.+on. There is only one Deburau, he declares, and there will be only one until he dies.

To the garret, then, comes Marie Duplessis, truant through all the seven years, but the joy of Deburau is short-lived. He finds that she has not come back because she loves him, but because she is sorry for him. She has come with her doctor. Still, after Marie has gone and Deburau has been left alone with the physician, he finds unexpected consolation for his weary spirit. The physician finds no physical ailment. The trouble, he declares, is a nervous one. For that he can do little. Some magic other than medicine is needed. He suggests books, painting, nature, but to each Deburau shakes a weary head. They don't interest him. The theater, the doctor continues, is perhaps the best hospital of all.

There are one or two actors, he tells Deburau, who are greater than any doctors in their power to bring merriment and new life to tired men.

"Who?" asks the sick man, and the doctor tells him of Deburau and his great art. Yes, by all means Deburau is the man he should see.

No sooner has the doctor left than Deburau calls for his hat and his stick. He will no longer sit idle while inferior men play his parts. He is going back to the theater. There we find him in the last act in the middle of a performance in one of his most famous roles, but his old grace and agility are gone. When the audience should weep it laughs and there are tears instead of smiles for his decrepit attempts at comedy.

Finally, he is hissed and booed and, after he has made a dumb speech of farewell, the curtain is rung down. The manager is in a panic. Somebody else must be put forward. It is quite evident that Deburau is done. In the crisis the old actor begs a favor. His son, he tells the manager, knows all his roles. Why not let the audience have a new Deburau, a young Deburau? Then, as the company gathers about to listen, the old man makes up the boy for his part, and as he does so he tells him in a few simple words the secrets and the fundamentals of the art of acting.

Presently the drum of the barker is heard outside the theater and the audience hears him announce that Deburau the great will give way to a greater Deburau, a Deburau more agile, more comic, more tragic. Then the terrified boy is pushed out upon the stage and the play begins.

By an ingenious device of David Belasco all our attention is focused upon the old man, who is listening and watching the performance of his successor, which we see only dimly through gauze curtains, but we hear the laughter and the shouts and the cheers. The new Deburau is a success, a triumph. The noise comes more faintly to our ears and we see only the old Deburau standing listening as from the house which has just hissed him there comes a wild acclaiming shout for his successor of "Deburau! Deburau!"

The old man does not know whether he should laugh or cry, and so he cries.

A Reviewer's Notebook

There is an amazing simplicity about great events. Creation week was clear, calm and quiet. Hardly a ripple was on the Rubicon the afternoon that Caesar crossed. Even Babylon fell softly and bounced only once. In the same spirit Pierre V. R. Key started _John McCormack: His Own Life Story_.

"It was a summer's day, with the sun s.h.i.+ning," writes Mr. Key, "when we began. McCormack sat on the veranda of Rocklea, his Noroton, Connecticut, villa, gazing out upon the waters of Long Island Sound. He had sat that way for some minutes, in a suit of tennis flannels, his stalwart body relaxed in an armchair. I waited for his opening words.

'What a debt a man owes to his mother and father,' he said."

Mr. Key's admiration for McCormack we found later on rests on una.s.sailable grounds. "He began to sing," Key writes, "he sings to-day--and will go on singing until he dies--for just one reason alone: G.o.d meant that he should sing."

We trust it will not be considered an impiety if we express a curiosity as to whether the nasal quality was included in G.o.d's intention.

We have forgotten what Aristotle or Clayton Hamilton or any of the others have set down as the first rule for playwrights, but it seems to us that it ought to be: Get O. P. Heggie. It makes no difference what the part may be, court dandy, early Christian or conjuror, Heggie is your man. The only disturbing factor is that into every role this actor brings a sort of spiritual animation. If you chance to call upon him to fall down stairs he will do it splendidly, missing not a single b.u.mp, and the audience will laugh its bellyful, but it will also have the feeling that in some curious way the thing has become exalted, that after all it may be the heart instead of the gizzard which is breaking under the emotion of the moment. Giving sawdust to this man is dangerous business, for the first thing you know he has changed it into blood.

Heggie was by all odds the outstanding figure in Ian Hay's pleasant farce-comedy, _Happy-Go-Lucky_. He was cast as Samuel Stillbottle, a bailiff's man, made up like Fields, the tramp juggler, and called upon to perform all the antics dear to low comedy. He did them with gusto, but there was something more. Heggie is almost the only actor we know who can trip over a door sill and keep his performance in two dimensions. The playwright may spread him into as broad a character as you please, but he cannot flatten him. Depth remains. When Heggie sets all the dishes to cras.h.i.+ng or guzzles stage whisky till he chokes we laugh first and then pause to wonder whether or not the soul of man is immortal.

All this should be a part of the best clowning. The great clown is for us all the symbol of man's defiance to the great s.p.a.ces and the wide darkness. Perhaps we die to-morrow, but to-day we are fellows of infinite jest. No matter what happens, we have laughed. To see O. P.

Heggie is to be reminded of all the clowns that have ever been and are to come in the eternal succession of the brave and brazen.

Nothing in the world dies quite as completely as an actor and the greater the actor the more terrifying becomes the sudden transition from radiance to darkness. One day he is there with all his moods and complexities and curious glints of this and that, and the next day there is nothing left but a few wigs and costumes; perhaps a volume of memoirs, and a sc.r.a.pbook of clippings in which we learn that the dead player was "majestic in presence" that "the poise of his head was stag-like" that he had "a great voice which boomed like a bell," that he was "regal, subtle, pathetic," and that "every one who was ever a.s.sociated with him loved and respected him."

Ask some veteran theatergoer "What was Booth like as Hamlet?" and he will say "Oh, he was wonderful." Perhaps the face of the old theatergoer will grow animated and Booth may live again for a moment in his mind, but we who have never seen Booth will never know anything about him.

n.o.body can recreate and explain the art of a dead actor to the next generation. Even men who do tricks and true magic with words are not adept enough to set down any lasting portrait of an actor on the wing.

A good deal of whitewash has flowed past the fence, but Tom Sawyer's trick still holds good. Even to-day it is possible to get hard work done by making people think of it as a privilege. In looking over an autumn catalogue, we came across a series of books for young persons in which we were struck by the t.i.tles, _When Mother Lets Us Help_ and _When Mother Lets Us Cook_. We trust that the series will be extended along these lines. If so, we intend to use as birthday gifts for H. 3rd, _When Father Lets Me Stoke the Furnace_, _When Father Lets Me s.h.i.+ne His Shoes_, and _When Father Lets Me Lend Him Money_.

A great number of persons for whose opinions we have the highest respect have a.s.sured us that _Woman_, by Magdeleine Marx, is an absorbing and well-written novel. We have done our best but we can't go through. At the last attempt, under whip and spur, we reached page 46 and there we found, "A gentle pearl-gray breeze was stirring the curtains." We can go no further. There is nothing for us to do but lie down and wait for the St. Bernards.