The Collected Drama of H L Mencken

by S. T. Joshi

  And now for a little group of books of stage history and dramatic criticism—the “Memories and Impressions” of the late Helena Modjeska; a volume of reviews entitled “At the New Theater and Others” by Walter Pritchard Eaton, formerly dramatic critic of the New York Sun; a sane and illuminating “Study of Bernard Shaw” as artist and philosopher, by Renée M. Deacon; a tome in support of the asinine theory that “Bacon Is Shakespeare,” by Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence, Bart. The Modjeska volume is a thick one in an attractive blue and gold binding and has scores of illustrations. The great Polish actress was not only a great actress, but also an educated and intelligent woman, and so her story is interesting, not only on account of the stirring events it records, but also on account of her shrewd observations upon those events. From the cradle to the grave she lived the life. A spectator of the burning of Warsaw as a child, she became in after years the intimate of her country’s most notable men and of personages of the first consequence in more than one foreign land. Altogether, her memories were worth setting down, and the book containing them is well worth buying and reading.

  To Mr. Eaton’s volume of criticism it is possible to give high praise with a clear conscience. He is one of the younger critics whose good work I have referred to above. He brings to his task an open mind, a hospitality to new ideas, a keen understanding of technical difficulties and a keen appreciation of achievement. But he is no mere chanter of eulogies—far from it. When a sham grimaces before him on the stage he takes aim at it with half a brick and brings it down—as his essay upon “The Bad Morals of Good Plays” and his terpsichorean fantasy, “Bare Feet and Beethoven,” well demonstrate. Above all, he writes with grace and clarity. In one place, as in duty bound, he praises the style of William Winter, that archaic word slinger, but his own style is vastly better than Winter’s, because it is clearer, more vibrant, more musical, less laden with polysyllables and adjectives. This Eaton, in truth, displays a quite astonishing talent for putting words together.

  The Deacon study of Shaw is notable for its good sense, a rare quality in dissertations upon the celebrated Irishman and his plays. Nine tenths of the persons who write about Shaw insist upon regarding him as a profound philosopher—which he is not. Mr. Deacon knows better. He knows that Shaw is a dramatist and not a philosopher, and so it is as a dramatist that he views and discusses his man. Uniform with this excellent little book appears a reprint of “Socialism and Superior Brains,” by Shaw himself, in which the dramatist, in the disguise of an ardent Socialist, wallops W. H. Mallock, the English anti-Marx. Finally comes “Bacon Is Shakespeare.” Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence, Bart., is firmly convinced, it appears, that Bacon wrote the plays of the Bard, and here he marshals his proofs in great array. If you in your turn are not firmly convinced after examining those proofs that Sir Edward Durning-Lawrence Bart., is a very much deluded Bart., I strongly advise and even urge you for the good of your family to call in some reliable physician and have him ask you questions.

  The New Dramatic Literature

  Upon the depressing stupidity and vulgarity of New York first nighters my colleague, Mr. Nathan, has lately discoursed with great eloquence. As for me, I am no New Yorker, save intermittently and unwillingly, and so I do not have to sit beside such animals very often; but they have thousands of relatives, of the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth nights, in the provinces, and the fair city I inhabit has its full share of them. They may be distinguished from truly civilized theatergoers by various signs. In the first place, their women always smell of unearthly coal tar perfumery; in the second place, they themselves always wear dinner coats; in the third place, they break into explosive laughter whenever the word “damn” is uttered on the stage; in the fourth place, they make a peculiar, indescribable, throaty sound whenever the proceedings become what they call “suggestive”; in the fifth place, they always speak of a play as a “show,” and in the sixth and last place, they distinguish but two classes of “shows,” to wit, good “shows” and rotten “shows.” In the former class—I speak especially of the provincial species—they put all plays with rubber stamp plots, all plays of bullring buffoonery and all plays of frank obscenity; and into the latter class they put all plays of ideas.

  Because of the presence of these simple folk, playgoing in our fair land is often a trying adventure. Not only do they make it necessary for our managers to give us far more bad “shows” than good ones, but they also have a habit of spoiling the “show” whenever it happens, by any chance, to be good. In the presence of such a drama as Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” Shaw’s “Man and Superman” or Walter’s “The Easiest Way” their one thought seems to be to smell out indecencies. Compared to their covert snickering, their incessant shuffling, their asinine whispering, the frank booing of the English gallery god is soothing as a sound and intelligent as a criticism. The less boorish theatergoer, trying to get himself into the mood for receiving and enjoying a work of art, is constantly annoyed and exasperated by the proximity of these killjoys. The actors on the stage, following the custom of their trade, always do their best to make the play absurd; the overdressed hinds in the auditorium complete the crime. To see Hervieu’s “Connais Toi” as I have seen it in Baltimore, with bad actors obfuscating it and a fat entrepreneur beside me sighing, “Oh, hell!” at intervals of three minutes, is not unlike hearing the funeral march of the Eroica Symphony done by honest union men at the “lodge of sorrow” of some barroom fraternal order.

  Fortunately there is no need for the partisan of the drama to submit himself to such assaults from stage and stalls. When the theater itself becomes unbearable he may flee to his own home, and there, in peace and quiet, read the plays which the vileness of man makes it painful, if not downright impossible, for him to see. Time was when Shakespeare was the only dramatist read by Americans—if, indeed, even he was read—but that time is happily no more. We have been taught, by enforced familiarity with the printed pages of Ibsen and Shaw, to visualize costumes and scenery, false whiskers and talcumed noses, in the library. We have learned a new trick and we joy to perform it. Not so many years ago the printing of a contemporary play of any value was a rare occurrence. Today they pour from the presses in a steady stream—English plays, translated Continental plays, even a few American plays—and the fact that they do so is proof that there is a public waiting for them. I have, in a collection by no means exhaustive, more than four hundred modern plays, and fully two hundred of them, I believe, are good plays. Of good plays the theaters of my town, taken together, offer about ten a year. It would thus take me twenty years to see two hundred there. But stretched at ease in the old homestead, a pillow under my head, I may read two hundred on two hundred nights, and then begin all over again and enjoy a hundred and sixty-five a second time before the year runs out.

  Here, for example, is Gerhart Hauptmann’s very impressive drama, “The Weavers,” done into English by Mary Morison. So far as I know, “The Weavers” has never been played in English in our theaters. Hauptmann’s “Hannele” has been seen (the first time it was produced in New York the moral ferrets of that town demanded that it be prohibited by the police), and his “The Sunken Bell” was once presented by Sothern and Marlowe;1 but “The Weavers,” undoubtedly the greatest of all his works and one of the most striking and influential of modern German plays, remains a stranger to our stage. For a dollar, however, one may now have it in a pretty little book, to read and study at one’s leisure, and without having to hear bad actors mouth its lines or to sit among donkeys who find it incomprehensible. Mr. Huebsch’s edition is a reprint of the London edition of William Heinemann. Let us hope that he will also reprint the other plays in the series—“Hannele,” “The Sunken Bell,” and “Lonely Lives.”

  Better still, here comes an American edition of the plays of John Millington Synge, beautifully printed and bound and extremely modest in price. Synge, like Hauptmann, is practically unknown to our theatergoers, and yet he wrote, during his short life, at least
two dramas of the first rank; and they were written, not in German or French or Norwegian, but in honest English. Reading his “Riders to the Sea” and “The Tinker’s Wedding,” you will make acquaintance with the one undoubted genius of the Neo-Celtic movement—not a fantastic, pale green mystic like W. B. Yeats, or a maker of crude folk plays like Douglas Hyde, but a noble poet plus a great dramatic craftsman, a man who got the universal note into scenes from the lives of simple Irish peasants, an Irishman who wrote an Irish tragedy so poignant that it lifted his people to a Grecian dignity, and a comedy so searching and merciless that it made his people scream. That tragedy is “Riders to the Sea,” a mere fragment, a thing of twenty-eight pages, and yet, if I do not err, a work of art of the very highest quality. I have never seen it on the stage, and if ever it is given in my vicinity I shall apply to be jailed during the performance, for it is impossible to imagine such marvelous prose coming from the mouths of actors, those sworn foes of all beauty. It is prose that enchants the ear with queer rhythms and exquisite cadences—prose that, for variety and movement, freedom and color, has been unapproached in our time. Synge once said that he had learned to write it by listening to West Coast Irishmen through a crack in the floor of his inn chamber. I don’t believe it. As well imagine Marlowe getting Faustus’s great speech before Helen from the horseboys of the Bankside!

  Synge wrote, in all, but six plays—the two mentioned, “The Playboy of the Western World” (a masterpiece of comedy), “The Shadow of the Glen,” “The Well of the Saints” and “Deirdre of the Sorrows,” which last I have yet to read. In addition he wrote two books of travel, “The Aran Islands” and “In Kerry and Wicklow”—notebooks, as it were, for his plays. Strangely enough, the incomparable Synge pros e, which appears in such magnificent flower in the speeches of his stage characters, is almost missing from his accounts of his own wanderings. Here and there one encounters a glowing page of it, but for the most part his descriptions are commonplace and sometimes even clumsy. Synge died in Dublin on April 1, 1909, at the early age of thirty-eight. He had been writing less than five years. What he would have come to had he lived fifteen years longer no man can tell. But once you have read his plays you will agree, I think, that his was one of the most original and arresting talents of our day and generation.

  Another Irishman of parts—George Bernard Shaw, no other—comes before us with a new book of some four hundred pages, containing three plays and three long prefaces. In the case of “Getting Married” and “The Showing-Up of Blanco Posnet” the prefaces are far more important than the plays. “Getting Married” shows, in spots, a plentiful cleverness, but elsewhere it shows mere smartness—and smartness, once its quality is reinforced by quantity, begins to grow tedious, like the kisses following the first dozen. As for “Blanco Posnet,” it is a somewhat cheap effort to shock the pious, in the course of which Mr. Shaw reveals the abysmality of his ignorance of spoken American. Where he got the dialect of his unearthly Westerners I don’t know, but I venture to suspect some German version of the Italian libretto of “The Girl of the Golden West.”2 There remains “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” an amusing and well constructed piece, in which fun is poked at the medical fellows on the one hand, and that puzzling thing, the artistic temperament, is studied on the other. Shaw’s hero is a great artist who is also a shameless scoundrel. To serve his art he preys upon all available game—his wife, his friends, mere strangers. At the very gates of success he falls ill, and eminent physicians are called in to wrestle with the bacilli which infest him. One of these physicians, the only one who can cure him, falls in love with his wife. What to do? Kill the scoundrel and get the wife, or save the artist and lose the wife? You may rest assured that Shaw neglects none of the opportunities that this amazing problem offers. The play, indeed, is the best he has done since “Man and Superman.”

  But in the preface, in which he undertakes to dispose of medical experimentation, the brilliance of his rhetoric does not conceal the weakness of his cause. Not that he employs the old, old arguments, depends upon the old, old false testimony, wrings the old, old tears. Far from it, indeed. With characteristic originality he seeks ammunition in the very latest discoveries of the pathologists—particularly in Sir Almroth Wright’s discovery of opsonins and of the so-called negative phase in the process of immunization.3 But after reading fifty pages of his engaging paralogy, one suddenly finds at the end that it is mere nonsense, after all—that Shaw, like every other anti-vivisectionist, is merely a sentimentalist who strains at a guinea pig and swallows a baby. In brief, the wild Irishman sinks to the level of a somewhat ridiculous crusader. The trouble with him is that he has begun to take himself seriously. When he was content to write plays first and discuss them afterward, he was unfailingly diverting. But now that he writes tracts first and then devises plays to rub them in he grows rather tedious.

  Of the other plays beore me the best are the twenty-one one-acters which Maurice Baring calls “Diminutive Dramas.” Here we have an amusing dialogue between Henry VIII and Catherine Parr, another between Socrates and Xantippe, a delicate burlesque upon Maeterlinck’s “The Blue Bird,” a rehearsal scene at the Globe Theater in 1595, a grotesque version of the story of King Alfred and the oat cakes—and many another fine piece of wit and humor, exquisitely wrought. Few of these little plays are for acting. They were fashioned for reading—and for reading they are delicious. Upon “The Woman and the Fiddler,” by some mysterious Norwegian who hides behind the pen name of Arne Norrevang, I can heap no such praises. As a matter of fact, the aim and purport of this fantastic piece are beyond me. I can only say that it deals with Norwegian folklore, that it suggests the more extravagant scenes of “Peer Gynt” and that it is happily impossible of performance on the stage. “Rust,” by Algernon Tassin, is a dramatic sermon against the overcoddling of women. Mr. Tassin yet shows an amateurish prolixity, but his dialogue often has vivacity and plausibility, and no doubt he will one day write a better play. Finally comes “A Lesson in Marriage,” a somewhat inept English version of Björnstjerne Björnson’s “De Nygifte” (The Newly Married), an old-fashioned two-acter first published so long ago as 1865, and in which one encounters the sound doctrine that it is dangerous for a young couple, lately spliced, to live with the bride’s parents. To Björnson such homely matters were always of interest. Even before Ibsen he felt the dramatic pull of the commonplace.

  Not only new plays, but also new books of stage history and dramatic criticism grow plentiful. Here, for example, are volumes of reminiscence by Daniel Frohman and Seymour Hicks, the one an American manager who stands in the front rank of his profession, and the other an English comedian and librettist. Mr. Frohman’s book is called “Memoirs of a Manager,” and in it he tells the story of the Lyceum Theater Company, the last of the great American stock companies. His anecdotes I leave for your enjoyment without preparation; of his serious chronicle it is sufficient to say that it shows him to have been, so far back as the eighties, an eager experimenter in the new drama that was then struggling so desperately against the old drama of balderdash. Mr. Frohman, in twenty years, saw such puerile things as “Hazel Kirke” and “Esmeralda” give way to the excellent comedies of Pinero and Jones, the middling comedies of Carton and Jerome and the passable comedies of Marshall and Fitch, and if he helped that progress in no other way he at least dared its box office risks and hazards. The Hicks book is “Twenty-Four Years of an Actor’s Life,” a light-hearted account of light-hearted adventures in the lesser drama which hangs upon the edges of vaudeville. Mr. Hicks is not a great artist—perhaps, indeed, he is not an artist at all—but it may be justly said for him that his nimble cavortings have helped the good folk of London to digest many a ton of suet pudding and many a lowing herd of kine.

  Finally come the dramatic critics—two of them, and both very entertaining and instructive fellows. In his “Masks and Minstrels of New Germany,” Percival Pollard deals with the so-called Uberbrettl’ movement of a decade ago, a brave effort to res
cue vaudeville from pothouse wit and tinpan music. Imagine Robert Loveman and Percy Mackaye writing comic ballads for Eva Tanguay and Nat Wills, and such musicians as Horatio Parker and Dr. Chadwick doing the music!4 Well, that is exactly what a group of hopeful young poets and composers attempted in Germany—Detlov von Liliencron, Otto Erich Hartleben and Otto Julius Bierbaum among the former, and Paul Lincke, Oscar Straus and Viktor Hollaender among the latter. A twofold aim inflamed these ardent youngsters. In the first place, they would make the varieties fit for civilized human beings, and in the second place they would revive the minstrelsy of the Golden Age—that most-low-flying, as the Germans might say, of all the arts—that art par excellence of the people. Naturally enough, the scheme failed. The German vaudeville audience, like the American vaudeville audience, feared and fears all true beauty. Its thirst is ever for the banal, the vulgar, the gross, the silly, the squalid. So it snickered idiotically and the Uberbrettl’ movement went to pot.

  But out of the wreck something came, after all—and that something was a new school of German writers. Frank Wedekind, falling under the influence of Hartleben and the rest, wrote “Früling’s Erwachen,” that most daring of latter day German plays; Hartleben himself, beginning as a minor poet, ended by revolutionizing the German short story; Bierbaum, graduating from the little Trianon Theater under the railway arch in Berlin, became a master of half a dozen forms—a poet recalling the minstrels of an elder day, a novelist of insight and humor, a writer of delightful sketches of travel, a hospitable and courageous critic. And by the efforts of these men and their followers a change came over the whole face of Gennan letters. Formalism fell into decay; in every direction experiment took the place of imitation; there was a wholesale shaking-up of old bones, a massacre of ancient gods; for the first time since Goethe’s death the clear note of truth was sounded. To date Bierbaum’s “Irrgarten der Liebe” has had a sale of 45,000 copies. Truly an extraordinary book of verse! Truly an extraordinary man! Truly an extraordinary movement! And in this little volume of his, Mr. Pollard chats of the books and men of that movement with unfailing understanding and sympathy. He is no solemn pundit, no ponderous reciter of critical formulæ. Going behind the printed page he shows us the man—and often the man, as in Hartleben’s case, is even more interesting than his creations. And the thing is done in that free and easy, confidential, ever surprising Pollard style which seems so easy to imitate—and is yet so abominably difficult.