The Collected Drama of H L Mencken
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And how did he conceal it? Simply by leaving it out. Scribe had built up an inordinately complex dramaturgy. His plays were elaborate and beautiful mechanisms but still always mechanisms. He had to sacrifice everything else—reason, probability, human nature—to make the machine run. And Augier, Feuillet, and Dumas, better men all, followed docilely in his tracks. They were better observers; they were more keenly interested in the actual life about them; they managed, despite the artificiality of their technique, to get some genuine human beings into their plays. But that technique still hung around their necks; they never quite got rid of it. But Ibsen did. In “A Doll’s House” he threw it overboard for all time. Instead of a complicated plot, working beautifully toward a foreordained climax, he presented a few related scenes in the life of a husband and wife. Instead of a finely wrought fabric of suspense and emotion, nicely balanced, neatly hanging together, he hit upon an action that was all suspense and all emotion. And instead of carefully calculated explanations, involving the orthodox couriers and prattling chambermaids, he let the story tell itself. The result, as William Archer has said, “was a new order of experience in the theatre.” The audience that came to be pleasantly diverted by the old, old tricks found its nerves racked by a glimpse through a terrifying keyhole. This thing was not a stage play, but a scandal. It didn’t caress and soothe; it arrested and shocked. It didn’t stay discreetly on the stage; it leaped out over the footlights.
The audience gasped and went out gabbling, and the resuft was the Ibsen madness, with its twenty years of folderol. But there were dramatists in the house who, with professional eye, saw more clearly what was afoot, and these dramatists, once they could shake off the Scribe tradition, began to imitate Ibsen—Jones and Pinero and later Shaw in England; Hauptmann and Sudermann in Germany; Gorki and many another in Russia; Hervieu, Brieux, and their like in France; a swarm of lesser ones in Italy, Scandinavia, and Austria. Ibsen, in brief, completely overthrew the well-made play of Scribe, and set up the play that was a direct imitation of reality. He showed that the illusion was not only not helped by the elaborate machinery of Scribe, but was actually hindered—that the way to sure and tremendous effects was by the route of simplicity, naturalness, ingenuousness. In “A Doll’s House” he abandoned all the old tricks save two or three; in “Ghosts” he made away with the rest of them, and even managed to do without a plot; by the time he got to “Little Eyolf” there was nothing left of the traditional dramaturgy save the act divisions. It was not, or course, an easy reform to put through. The habits of mind of audiences had to be changed; the lunacies of the Ibsenites had to be lived down, and the moral ire of the anti-Ibsenites; above all, the actors of the time had to be untaught all that they knew about acting, and taught a lot of new things that violated their vanity and hurt their business. But Ibsen’s notions had logic behind them, and they had the force of novelty, and there was in them a new and superior opportunity for the dramatist who really had something to say, and so, in the end, they triumphed in the world. To-day the methods of Scribe are so archaic that they excite laughter; only the Broadhursts and Kleins6 of Broadway stoop to them. If an intelligent dramatist were to expose a play built upon the plans of “Verre d’Eau” or “Adrienne Lecouvreur,” even the newspaper critics would laugh at him. All that sort of thing now belongs to archeology.
But Ibsen, as I have said, was a dramatist first and last, and not a tin-pot agitator and messiah. He depicted the life of his time and he made use of the ideas of his time; he had no desire to change those ideas, nor even, in the main, to criticize them. “A dramatist’s business,” he used to say, “is not to answer questions, but merely to ask them.” He asked a question in “A Doll’s House.” He asked another, ironically, in “Ghosts.” He asked others in “The Lady from the Sea,” “The Wild Duck,” and “Little Eyolf.” In “The Master Builder,” rising, so to speak, to a question of personal privilege, he abandoned his habit and ventured upon a half-answer. But is there any answer in “Hedda Gabler”? Surely not. The play is still chewed and belabored by advocates of this answer or that; the very lack of agreement shows the dramatist’s neutrality. “It was not my desire,” he once said, “to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day.” That is to say, here is your state of society, here is your woman, here is what she does—what do you think of it? So, again, in “Pillars of Society.” Here is your society, here are your pillars, here are their rascalities—what have you to say of it? Joseph Conrad, another great artist, once put the thing admirably. “My task which I am trying to achieve,” he said, “is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.”
Notes
Introduction
1. HLM, Newspaper Days (New York: Knopf, 1941), 110.
2. Newspaper Days, 123.
3. HLM, My Life as Author and Editor (New York: Knopf, 1993), 289.
4. My Life as Author and Editor, 289.
5. My Life as Author and Editor, 289.
6. My Life as Author and Editor, 290.
7. Heliogabal: Schwank in drei Ak ten (Theatralia, 1920).
Part I. The Plays
The Artist: A Drama without Words
This play was first published in the Bohemian 17, no. 6 (December 1909): 805–8. It then appeared as a separate publication (Boston: John W. Luce, 1912 [rpt. 1913, 1923]). It was reprinted in the Smart Set 49, no. 4 (August 1916): 79–84 and in HLM’s A Book of Burlesques (New York: John Lane, 1916; rev. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920). John Lane reprinted the Luce edition in 1917, and Samuel French did so in 1920. The play simultaneously satirizes the bland professionalism of musicians, the moony reactions to music by females in the audience, and the incompetence of music critics.
1. “Valse Poupée” (Doll’s Waltz) is fictitious, although several composers wrote a “Valse de la Poupée,” including Delibes and Waldteufel (but these are not for solo piano). Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler (1863–1927) was an Austrian-born pianist who emigrated to the United States when she was four.
2. HLM refers to the pianists Ignacy Jan Paderewski (Polish, 1860–1941), Josef Hofmann (Polish-American, 1876–1957), and Vladimir de Pachmann (Russian-German, 1848–1933).
3. Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), American pianist and composer.
4. HLM was fond of pointing out this common American mispronunciation of scherzo.
In the Vestry Room
This play appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (30 May 1910): 6, and has never been reprinted. It is one of many writings by HLM expressing cynicism about the institution of marriage.
Seeing the World
This play appeared in HLM’s irregular column “Pertinent and Impertinent,” Smart Set 41, no. 3 (November 1913): 63–68, although there it was presented as a short story. It was reprinted in both editions (1916, 1920) of A Book of Burlesques.
1. HLM refers to the popular German song “Still wie de Nacht und tief wie das Meer” (Calm as the night and deep as the sea). The most celebrated setting is by Carl Bohm (1844–1920).
2. HLM refers to an immensely popular series of travel guides published by the German firm Verlag Karl Baedeker beginning in the 1870s and subsequently translated into English and many other languages. The guides were recognizable by their red covers.
3. Jane Addams (1860–1935), American social activist; Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), the most celebrated Italian tenor of his day.
4. Sapolio was a heavily advertised brand of soap manufactured from 1869 until just before World War II.
5. A Baracca Class is a Sunday school class for men.
6. John McGraw (1873–1934), a Major League baseball player (1891–1905) and subsequently manager of several teams, notably the New York Giants (1902–1932).
Asepsis: A Deduction in Scherzo Form
This play appeared in HLM’s column “Pertinent and Impertinent,” 41, no. 2 (October 1913): 63–67, under the title A Eugenic Wedding. It was then reprinted in both editions (1916, 1920) of A Book of Burlesques. It is a send-up of exaggerated concerns about sexual health among young married couples.
1. HLM refers to the Aus trian geneticist Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), the British statistician and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), the British psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), and the American eugenicist and educator David Starr Jordan (1851–1931). HLM wrote several essays on Ellis in the 1920s.
Death: A Philosophical Discussion
This play, about conventional and stereotypical reactions to death, first appeared in the Smart Set 44, no. 4 (December 1914): 213–16, under the title “Death: A Discussion” (as by “Robert W. Woodruff”). It was reprinted in both editions (1916, 1920) of A Book of Burlesques.
1. HLM is recording the American mispronunciation of Hofbräu Cafe.
The Wedding: A Stage Direction
This clever play—if it can be called that, as it is nothing but an immense stage direction—first appeared in the Smart Set 45, no. 3 (March 1915): 255–62 (as by “Robert W. Woodruff”). It was reprinted in both editions (1916, 1920) of A Book of Burlesques. A pungent satire on various aspects of marriage, it is one of HLM’s most frequently reprinted comic pieces, having appeared in Henry C. Carlisle Jr.’s American Satire in Prose and Verse (1962), Gene Shalit’s Laughing Matter: A Celebration of American Humor (1987), and Frank Muir’s The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose (1990).
1. Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), French organist, composer, and teacher.
2. Ethelbert Nevin (American, 1862–1901), “Oh! That We Two Were Maying” (Sketchbook, Opus 2, No. 8, 1888), a song for voice and piano.
3. Ethelbert Nevin, The Rosary (1898), a song for voice and piano. Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925), German composer and pianist.
Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts
This play was published separately by Alfred A. Knopf (New York) in January 1920. See the introduction for the details of its composition by HLM and his longtime colleague George Jean Nathan (hereafter GJN).
Heliogabalus (203?–222 C.E.), more accurately Elagabalus (misspelled by HLM in Act III as “Elegabalus”), was Emperor of Rome from 218 to 222. His name derives from the fact that he was priest of El-Gabal, a Syro-Roman sun god. Although by law he was (as he points out several times in the play) both Emperor and Pontifex Maximus (the chief religious office in Rome), Elagabalus instituted the worship of the sun god (Deus Sol Invictus). He also became noted for his sexual dissipation, having been married at least five times (but not simultaneously, as HLM and GJN suggest) and also seeking out male lovers. His first wife was Julia Cornelia Paula; other wives were the Aquilia Severa (a Vestal Virgin) and Annia Aurelia Faustina.
The main ancient sources for the life and reign of Elagabalus is the Historia Augusta and Cassio Dio’s Roman History. But HLM and GJN probably derived most of their information from J. Stuart Hay’s The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911). They cite three of the wives mentioned by Hay (Caelestis, Alinia, and Dacia are fictitious). Caius Macrinius, Commander of the Western fleet, is also fictitious but may be derived from Marcus Opellius Macrinus, the emperor who preceded Elagabalus on the throne (r. 217–18). Rufinius and the Christians Lucia the Galatian and Simon of Cappadocia are fictitious.
HLM and GJN not the first playwrights to write about Elagabalus. The French dramatist Auguste Villeroy wrote a five-act verse play, Héliogabale (1902). Two later French dramatists also wrote plays about the emperor: Pierre Moinot’s Héliogabale (1971) and Belghanem’s El Gabal; ou, La nuit de l’erreur (1974).
1. Rom. 12:19.
2. “Let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay.” James 5:12.
3. A Christian Latin poet (c. 250 C.E.) and author of two extant poems, the Instructiones and the Carmen Apologeticum. The quatrain above was in fact written by HLM and GJN.
4. In fact, Paula was married to Elagabalus only in 219; they divorced the following year.
5. A reference to the tale recounted in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 5:1–20; Matt. 8:28–34; Luke 8:26–39) in which Jesus cures one man (or, in some accounts, two) of demonic possession by exorcing the demon or demons (“My name is Legion”) from the man and forcing them into the bodies of pigs, who then hurl themselves over a cliff.
6. A paraphrase of 1 Timothy 3:2.
7. The epigram is by HLM himself—first published here, apparently.
8. This epigram was, according to HLM, sent in by an anonymous contributor to the Smart Set. See HLM and GJN, Pistols for Two (New York: Knopf, 1917), 29.
9. This is epigram 1 in HLM’s A Little Book in C Major (1916).
10. A reference to the law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the United States’ entry into World War I, nominally making it illegal to interfere with U.S. military operations but whose scope in practice extended much more widely. HLM regarded it as a severe infringement of civil liberties.
11. Misspelling of Tarentum, a city in southern Italy where wine was made.
12. Matt. 16:23; Luke 4:8.
Part II. Mencken on Drama
“By Way of Introduction” to George Bernard Shaw: His Plays
This is the introduction to HLM’s second book and first prose treatise, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (Boston: John W. Luce, 1905). The rest of the book discusses each of Shaw’s plays written up to that time (from Mrs. Warren’s Profession to Major Barbara), with a chapter on Shaw’s novels and other writings, a chapter of biographical data, and a concluding chapter, “Shakespeare and Shaw.” The introduction provides an overview of Shaw’s dramatic and other work in the context of the intellectual currents of his time.
1. Don César de Bazan is the lead character in the opera Don César de Bazan (1872) by Jules Massanet, based on the play Ruy Blas (1838) by Victor Hugo. Captin Bluntschli is a major character in Arms and the Man.
2. Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (1850–1916) was one of the leading British military officers of the day; in 1905 he was Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India. “Tommy Atkins” was British slang for a common soldier.
3. Francisque Sarcey (1827–1899), the leading French drama critic of his age. Most of his criticism was first published as reviews in such newspapers as Le Figaro and Le Temps.
4. Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).
5. HLM probably found this quotation his friend James Huneker’s essay “Henrik Ibsen” in Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists (New York: Scribner, 1905), 68–69.
6. From Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay “On Philosophy and Its Method,” in The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays, trans. Bailey Saunders and Ernest Belfort Bax (Washington, DC: Walter M. Dunne, 1901), 238–39.
7. Victorien Sardou (1831–1908), French dramatist who pioneered the “well-made play.”
8. Henry Kellar (1849–1922), American magician who began performing in 1869 and is reputed as a significant predecessor to Harry Houdini.
9. Frank Gardner is a character in Mrs. Warren’s Profession; Sidney Trefusis is a character in Shaw’s novel An Unsocial Socialist (1887); Finch McComas is a character in You Never Can Tell; Roebuck Ramsden is a character in Man and Superman.
10. Clyde Fitch (1865–1909), American dramatist best known for Nathan Hale (1898), The Climbers (1901), and other plays.
11. HLM refers to two comedies by Scottish dramatist J. M. Barrie (1860–1937), one under an erroneous title: The Admirable Crichton (1902) and Alice Sit-by-the-Fire (1905).
William Shakespeare
This article appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (23 April 1910): 6, and has never been reprinted. It recounts HLM’s early views on the true sources of Shakespeare’s greatness as a dramatist.
1. HLM refers to the British actors and theater managers Sir Herbert Bee rbohm Tree (1852–1917), William Lewis Waller (1860–1915), and Sir John Hare (1844–1921).<
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2. Eugène Scribe (1791–1861), French dramatist who, with Victorien Sardou, pioneered the “well-made play.”
A Drama of Ideas
This article appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (12 May 1910): 6, and has never been reprinted. It is in large part a review of a recent production of Galsworthy’s Strife.
A Plea for Comedy
This article appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun (28 May 1910): 6, and has never been reprinted. It engagingly recounts HLM’s fondness for “low” comedy as typified by the slapstick found in vaudeville.