The Collected Drama of H L Mencken
Page 18
A Drama of Ideas
The New Theatre Company of New York closed its first Baltimore engagement at the Auditorium last night with an extremely brilliant performance of John Galsworthy’s “Strife,” a drama dealing with the war between capital and labor. The audience was as fashionable as the opera crowd, but it by no means filled the house, nor did it deafen the actors with huzzahs. But perhaps the phenomena of the night were largely responsible for both facts, for it was chilly and muggy without the theatre and hot and muggy within.
The scene of “Strife,” as the play has been Americanized, is a small town in southeastern Ohio, the home of the Ohio River Tin Plate Mills. It is early in February, and a strike has been going on since the autumn, to the loss of both the company and the men. The latter are fighting for a new wage scale, and the company is holding out for the old one. The unions have nothing to do with the strike, for the pay the men demand differs from the union scale in various important particulars. In consequence, they have had no support from without, and when the play opens they are on the verge of starvation.
Simon Harness, a walking delegate of the Tin Plate Workers’ Union, comes to the mills to offer the men the support of the union if they will only abate their demands a bit, but led by David Roberts, a striking engineer, they refuse to do so. Harness then turns to the directors of the company, but here, too, he is unsuccessful, for John Anthony, the president, refuses absolutely to listen to any talk of compromise.
It soon becomes apparent, in truth, that the contest is not a war between the company and the men, but a duel between Roberts and Anthony, the one a fanatical champion of labor and the other an irresponsible champion of capital. The majority of the strikers are for compromise, with Harness as mediator, and the majority of the directors are also for compromise; but Roberts and Anthony set their faces against any such weak yielding. Each demands a complete victory, or utter defeat. Each declares for a struggle to the death, no matter how appalling the cost.
That cost, it soon becomes evident, will be staggering enough. The company has already lost $250,000 by the strlke, and every day sees its loss increasing. Thirty-four years of prosperity are behind it, but not far ahead, unless something is done quickly, bankruptcy will begin to threaten it. As for the men, they are in a miserable plight, indeed. Their savings have been swept away, they are getting no help from the union, and the winter is bitterly cold. Upon the women and children, huddling in their cold, cheerless homes, the penalties of the struggle are falling.
The men are shaken by the sight of all this suffering, and begin to murmur against Roberts, but he sweeps them aside imperiously. Who has made greater sacrifices than he? Into the strikers’ war fund he has thrown $4,000—the savings of his whole life. And who is suffering more than his own wife—a helpless invalid? The comforts that might prolong her life he cannot buy for her. When they are offered by the pitying daughter of Anthony, Roberts refuses them with scorn. He is determined to bring the mill to terms, if he has to sacrifice the lives of all the strikers, and the lives of their wives and children in the process.
As for Anthony, he is a fighter of the same desperate, unyielding sort. The other directors, including even his own son, urge him to offer the men a sensible compromise. They are tired of the struggle, they think of their lost dividends, they want to get back to Pittsburg, they are moved by honest pity for the suffering women and children. But Anthony waves them aside. He has been fighting labor, he says, for 50 years, and he knows the game. It must be played standing up, and with a desperate determination to win or die.
It soon becomes apparent, of course, that, with Roberts and Anthony lea ding the opposing sides, the strike will never end. In each man the yearning to overthrow and humble the other is an ungovernable passion, transcending all mere ideas. They are like two huge stags, locking horns in a death struggle. Neither will yield an iota; neither will even talk of yielding. And meanwhile the cold winds blow and the women and children shiver, and the Ohio River Tin Plate Mills, after a generation of successful operation, come close to bankruptcy. Roberts’ wife is the first actual victim. She dies for want of the common necessities of life.
This dramatic proof of the hopelessness of their plight moves the strikers to demand that Roberts come to some terms with Anthony; and at the same moment the directors of the mills, shrinking from responsibility for more suffering among the helpless, demand that Anthony come to terms with Roberts. The two grim leaders fight this treason in their respective camps doggedly, but in vain. The strikers depose Roberts and take the matter into their own hands. The directors depose Anthony, and ask Harness, the union leader, to settle the strike in their name. As the curtain falls Roberts and Anthony stand face to face.
“Then you’re no longer president of the company!” cries Roberts, mocking his old enemy. Suddenly some understanding of the grim humor of the situation comes over him. “So they’ve thrown us both down!” he laughs. “Thrown us both down!” And he staggers out, a beaten man at last.
Anthony sits there for a moment in his chair—a beaten man, too. Then he slowly rises and goes out, and as he does so the directors crowd up to sign the new agreement with the men. Tench, the secretary of the company, and Harness, the union leader, gather all the papers.
“Do you know,” says Tench, “that these are the very terms we drew up, you and I, and put to both sides before the strike began? All this—all this—and—what for?”
Harness wonders, too. Then a thought strikes him.
“That’s where the fun comes in,” he says.
No critical acumen is needed to see the dramatic effectiveness, the sturdy structure, the rare craftsmanship, the human interest of this fine play. The action proceeds, as one may say, in a straight line; there is no turning aside for “relief,” comic or otherwise; there is no dependence upon stock characters and ancient stage devices. The idea at the bottom of the drama is apparent from the very start, and the audience is engrossed to the end by that gigantic duel between fanatical labor leader and hunkerous, inhuman capitalist.
And the merits which appear in the general plan of the play are matched by equally striking merits in detail. The dialogue is straightforward, nervous, real; the characters, great and little, have rotundity and verity; we are constantly interested in them and in the things they are doing. The play as a whole, indeed, is a remarkably good example of the new style in playwriting—the style of the later Pinero, of Brieux, of Sudermann, and of Shaw in his serious moods. Let Mr. Galsworthy be made welcome to the theatre. He is a dramatist with something to say—and he knows how to say it.
The New Theatre Company plays “Strife” in a manner which deserves all praise. There is constant evidence of the sacrifice of individual opportunity to the general effect—of that admirable team-work remarked in “The Winter’s Tale.” The smallest parts are played by excellent actors. Oswald Yorks is a servant; Henry Stanford has scarcely a dozen lines; Beverley Sit greaves appears in but one short scene.
The parts of Roberts and Anthony are in the hands of Albert Bruning and Louis Calvert, respectively—both actors of sound intelligence and notable skill. Nothing could be more impressive than Mr. Calvert’s picture of the cold-blooded, implacable and ruthless Anthony—nothing, perhaps, save Mr. Bruning’s picture of the wild-eyed, fanatical and equally ruthless Roberts.
An admirable performance, indeed, and of a play of the first calibre! Let us hope that the New Theatre Company will return next year. Its three days’ engagement has been sufficient to take away the bad taste left by a long series of dull, stupid, maudlin dramas, written by fools and played by fourth-rate actors.
A Plea for Comedy
A strenuous effort to make vaudeville refined, even at the risk of making it utterly unendurable, seems to be in progress. One by one, the good, old Brutal Brothers acts are being exiled to the medicine shows and one-ring circuses, and in their place all sorts of excessively “polite” turns are offered. Eminent musicians thump the piano or fiddle away
for 11, 12 or 13 minutes; decayed stars of the legitimate appear in one-act plays with a sob in every line; and in general there is an accentuation of the pathetic, the ladylike, the respectable and the downright maudlin to the lasting detriment of the amusing.
Let us cast one loud, melancholy vote against that madness! Let me warn the vaudeville magnates that, if they would get my trade, they must go back to first principles. I have no desire to weep, to think or even to sleep when I go to a vaudeville show, but only a strong, animal yearning to guffaw. I want to lean back in my narrow, uncomfortable chair and bawl. I crave low comedy, of the lowest and most humorous sort, laid on with a shovel, rammed in with a slapstick, soaked with a seltzer siphon. It is only thus that my midriff can get its violent but salubrious massage.
There are bilious and inhuman folk who maintain that low comedy is not amusing; that it is not pleasant to see the first comedian wallop the second comedian over the head with a rubber ax; that there is no honest fun in the cracking of skulls. Let us pity all who think so! They miss a lot in life. They never know what it means to lay back and laugh like a hyena—to laugh so heartily that the ribs squeak and crackle beneath the strain and the jawbone aches for hours afterward. Such cachination is the safest and most delightful of all tonics. It is ten times as powerful as a mint julep and not one-tenth as damaging. No matter how much the ribs are strained, they never really break; no matter how abominably the jawbone aches it is never actually dislocated.
If you want to see genuine, old-fashioned vaudeville today you must go to the burlesque houses. Down at the Gayety and Monumental they still use up a wagon-load of barrels every week making slapsticks, and still buy loaded seltzer siphons by the case. It must cost a lot to provide the artillery for some of those shows. I have seen 10 slapsticks broken in half an hour and 100 gallons of seltzer water projected into the eyes and down the backs of low comedians in one night. I have seen scaramouches belabor one another with fencerails, dishpans, cowbells, chairs, sofas, rolling pins, swords, curtain poles and monkey wrenches; with—
Ladders, Frying Pans,
Plug hats, Canvas trees,
Live dogs, Artificial rocks,
Beefsteaks, Door mats,
Cuspidors, Soaked newspapers,
Piano legs, Papier mache poultry,
Telephone receivers, Bicycle tires,
Boards, Pistol butts,
Boots, Spears,
Walking sticks, Bladders,
Rolls of oilcloth, Mixed drinks,
Lariats, Bungstarters,
Crockery, Ice-picks,
Hatchets, Kettle drums,
Beer steins, Hammers,
Stethoscopes, Buckets,
Lead pipe, Bags of flower,
Garden hose, Confetti,
Iron cigars, Crutches,
Celluloid bricks, Coffee pots,
Clarinets in B, Trombones,
Clarinets in A flat, Helmets,
Chains, Repeating rifles,
Ropes, Mayonnaise,
Tables, Violins.
And, believe me, every last weapon had its own individual humor. No matter what the technique, there was always an invigorating guffaw in the wallop.
According to Col. Sam Dawson,1 that astute student of horseplay, the happy thought of substituting a cheap violin for the customary slapstick was invented by Weber and Fields.2 That was years ago and they were appearing, at the time, as a pair of German musicians. Fields carried a violin, which Weber borrowed from him. They then got into an altercation, and of a sudden Weber came down upon Fields’ head with the fiddle, which was splintered into a thousand pieces. Set down in cold blood, of course, the incident seems tame enough, but it was sufficiently comic, as enacted, to make the reputation of the two comedians. People fell screaming into the aisles; the roars of mirth stopped the show; on more than one occasion the police came galloping, thinking there was a panic.
Since then that fiddle trick has been done by hundreds of second-rate Merry Andrews, but Weber and Fields got their profit out of it while it was yet new. The fiddles they used cost them $1.80 apiece by the gross, and giving two performances a day, they destroyed 12 fiddles a week. Thus, their weekly fiddle bill was $21.60—but their audiences were so delighted that their salary rose from $60 a week to $500, and so they made a net profit of $418.40.
It is impossible, of course, to happen upon so brilliant an idea every day, but all the same it is not the only one to the credit of Weber and Fields. The device of fighting a duel with billiard cues, now so common on the burlesque stage, is another of their delightful inventions, They also devised the slapstick made of three barrel staves instead of the usual two. Its virtue lies in the fact that its sudden impact, upon the pantaloons or elsewhere, produces a loud and complex noise like that made by what is called triple-tonguing on the cornet.
Incidently, it may be mentioned that Weber and Fields discovered the humorous possibilities of the cornet itself. Twenty years ago that horrible horn was received quite gravely, as a true musical instrument, by the plain people of America. But now its employment, at sober music-making, is confined to circus concerts and park bands. Whenever a performer produces a cornet in vaudeville the crowd begins to laugh, because it knows by experience that he will soon be making funny sounds with it, or bringing rabbits and beef stews out of it, or beating some other performer over the head with it.
Why is low comedy so all-fired funny? Why do we all laugh so heartily when the slapstick comes down upon the assistant comedian’s skull? There are acidulous psychologists, so-called, who tell us that the taste for such rough humor is an atavistic proof of our barbarous ancestry; that those of us who love low comedy are brutes. But in this case, as in many others, it is easy to confute the psychologists by appealing from their theories to the facts. Men of the first consideration are eager patrons of the circus, and yet all circus humor, it must be plain, is based upon assault. Unless the clowns clubbed one another, played painful practical jokes upon one another and met with grotesque accidents every other minute, they would be sorry clowns, indeed, and no one would pay money to see them.
In the burlesque houses, where genuine vaudeville is still nourished and a c-claimed, the average audience is certainly not made up of newsboys and criminals. There may be plenty of both classes, true enough, upstairs, but on the first floor fully half of the men are of the eminently respectable type. So far I have yet to see a bishop at a burlesque show, but I have seen plenty of doctors, lawyers and business men, including not a few members of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association. This reminds me, by the way, that I once attended a prizefight—and a hot and gory one it was!—which was honored by the presence of five millionaires, two Congressmen, an eminent physician and no less than eight lawyers of distinction. All sat upon the stage, in the full view of the house!
No; it is impossible to dismiss the comedy of mayhem as an amusement of the canaille only. No doubt the true reason for the favor it enjoys among all classes lies in the fact that it is always simple and understandable. An epigram often eludes even the most alert of us, but the loud note of the slapstick reaches the perceptions of all. Say what you will against it, you will have to admit that it is uproariously funny. Fight against it as you will, it will infallibly make you laugh.
And in the criticism that it is inhuman there is very little validity. It is plain enough, of course, that an unprovoked assault upon a human being must always be inhuman—but how about a justifiable assault upon a vaudevillain? Isn’t it a fact, after all, that the average vaudevillain richly deserves all of the clubbing he gets? And besides, isn’t it a fact that we are all well aware, the while we laugh at that clubbing with vociferous roars, that it really doesn’t hurt him?
Et-Dukkehjemiana
“A Doll’s House” is growing old. There are older things in the world, it is true, but there are also younger things, and some of these latter are obviously beyond the first blush of youth. Of dramas, for instance, there is “Hazel Kirke.”1 Its 486 cons
ecutive performances will never be forgotten, so long as love is beautiful and heroism sublime, but already the memory of them has grown faint, and begins to exhale a fragrance of old lavender. And yet, on the night that the curtain of the Madison Square Theatre first rose upon Dunstan Kirke’s mill and the piccolo sounded its first bird-call, “A Doll’s House” was a lusty youngster of one month and fourteen days. When “Esmeralda” began to enchant and charm it was nearly two years old; when “The Young Mrs. Winthrop” revealed the sorrows of the elegant it was almost three.2 Therefore, it may be taken as evident that “A Doll’s House” is no longer young. It saw the light, in fact, on December 21, 1879, at the Royal Theatre, in Copenhagen.
Now, a play is like a woman in this: that after it passes the age of twenty-five it begins to have a history. A man may be sixty, or even ninety, and still provoke no reminiscences, but after a woman passes the fateful quarter post, there arise friends who hammer the lower strata of old trunks and bring forth fossil daguerreotypes and fading album prints of a girl in outlandish, prehistoric garb, and hand them about among scoffers and statisticians. And so it is with a play. As yet, “A Doll’s House” lacks the full panoply of a variorum edition, but already there are oldsters who begin to remember that they saw Modjeska3 play it in 1883, and here and there, if you search carefully, you will find a literary archæologist who preserves a copy of Weber’s first translation (anno domini 1880),4 and pretends that it made him discern the genius of Ibsen far back in the Ages of Faith.
Mme. Modjeska, were it not for such memorarians, might lack to-day the posthumous honor which belongs to her valor as a pioneer. When she ventured to set “A Doll’s House” before an American audience, the Norwegian was still a mere fantastic cloud upon the horizon—a shape half real and half imaginary, of a new and impalpable species. Scandinavia had long known him as an irritating poet, and Germany was beginning to be aware of him as an iconoclast, but among the English-speaking peoples he was announced, and that was all. Edmund Gosse, the literary explorer, was his sponsor.5 Mr. Gosse had been sponsor, too, for the sestina and the chant-royal, which may explain, perhaps, the apathy with which the greatest of his discoveries was received.