Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905

Mr. Stange’s play was an amusing comedy, dealing with domestic infelicity – of the tit-for-tat order – in the “old” style. That is to say, it did not flaunt in our faces a fracture of the seventh commandment, or drag in a series of epigrams modeled upon those of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld and Oscar Wilde. Mr. Stange went in for what we call the “artificial,” but it all occurred in 1720. The eighteenth century covers a multitude of sins that are naked and unashamed in the twentieth. We were disarmed in our frenzied analysis when we were confronted with such purely imaginary and entertaining types as Sir John and Lady Belinda Manners, Lady Airish, Lady Speakill, Lady Tattle, Lord Foppington and Lord Drinkwell.

We were back again amid the “old comedy” characters, of whom we always talk with sycophantic admiration. Sometimes we loathe them, but we never say so. There has been a sporadic revival of one or two of these “old comedies” this season, accomplished with that “bargain-counter” atrocity – a sop for vulgar minds – known mischievously as the “all-star-cast.” It has been amusing to watch the cold, dispiriting and almost clammy reception accorded to these “classics,” compared with the cordiality extended to Miss Alice Fischer in her “imitation” classic, “The School for Husbands.” Yet, if a well-read, modern playwright cannot improve upon the eighteenth century, with his sublime knowledge of all that has occurred since – then he must indeed be rather small potatoes.

Mr. Stange made these improvements. While the revived work of the late Oliver Goldsmith and Dion Boucicault languished, the “old comedy” of the twentieth century triumphed. If you saw it, you will understand why. There were episodes in “The School for Husbands” that were very clever and enlivening. All the characters were puppets, but they danced with the latest electric improvements, and their gyrations entertained. Blood they certainly lacked, but nobody cared. It was a relief to watch this amusing but thoroughly refined tomfoolery, and to know that no problem lurked beneath it. It was the Eden Musée, suddenly galvanized into life and pirouetting in all its color and brilliancy.

With Arthur Forrest, who is a fine, distinguished, subtle, convincing actor; with Miss Grace Filkins, Jameson Lee Finney and Mrs. Ida Jeffreys-Goodfriend, Miss Fischer managed to beat any “all-star-cast” – the refuge of the destitute. The star herself was so irresistible, so dominant and so largely vital, that hundreds of people who had merely heard of Alice Fischer were glad to meet her. This “venture” firmly established her, and the establishment was conducted by such legitimate means that the event was unusually interesting.

Oh, I’m tired of stars. I am – I am! Last month I devoted myself almost exclusively to them, and now I find that the cry is still “they come, they come!” To be sure, Miss Marie Tempest and Miss Alice Fischer both achieved success, but now I see before me the plaintive figure of poor little Miss Annie Russell, who didn’t. Miss Russell came to the Criterion Theater with a Zangwill play. It sounds well, doesn’t it? – but I can assure you that the sound was most misleading.

Nothing quite so drab, so despondently dreary, or so damply dismal as “Jinny the Carrier” ever asked for a hearing and got it. Zangwill has lectured upon the drama, and paid pungent respect to its incongruities, but he has proved himself to be infinitely worse than the various playwrights whom he ridiculed. “The Serio-Comic Governess,” thrust upon Miss Cecilia Loftus, was bad enough, but “Jinny the Carrier” went far below it, and stayed there all the time.

It was an “idyll” of Frog Farm, near London, and Frog Farm seemed to be a trifle less amusing than Hunter’s Point, near New York. It introduced us to rural types of deadly monotony, among them being a “village patriarch,” suggesting cheap melodrama; a veterinary surgeon, a postman, a village dressmaker and Jinny herself, who “ran” a wagon, and who subsequently fell in love with a rival who tried to drive her out of the business. There were four acts of cumulative hopelessness, and by the time Jinny was ready to get married, the audience seemed just as ready to die of fatigue.

The humor was supplied by the village dressmaker, who owned a mustache, and who clamored for a depilatory! This pleasing, refined and frolicsome bit of originality failed to awaken people from their torpor. There was a good deal of talk about pigs and horses, while tea, cucumbers and marmalade graced the dialogue incessantly; but the amazed audience could not indorse this rural festival. Jinny, amid the pigs, horses, tea, cucumbers and marmalade, talked in Mr. Zangwill’s best style – a style replete with wordplay or pun – but her setting killed her, and she was soon “done for.”

Perhaps “Jinny the Carrier” was a joke. Who shall say? It is a bit “fishy” – I forgot to say that a real, dead fish was among the débris of this comedy – that two such bad plays as “Jinny the Carrier” and “The Serio-Comic Governess” honored New York to the exclusion of London. It is all very well to say that New York is so generous, so appreciative, so alive to all the good points of clever writers – it is all very well to say that, and sometimes it reads very well – but the fact remains that these plays had no good points. London would have laughed at them in immediate derision. We need feel no pride in the circumstance of their original production in New York. Instead, we should feel perfectly justified in feeling extremely sorry for ourselves. We might even say that both of these plays were foisted upon us in a spirit of “Oh, anything’s good enough for New York!”

I don’t say, and I don’t believe, that this was the reason we suffered from this Zangwill rubbish. Our ill luck was due to the fact that playwrights and plays, owing to the grinding theatrical dictatorship that has absolutely pulverized the healthy God-given spirit of competition, by which alone an Art can be kept alive, are few and far between. The manager takes what he can get, and he can get precious little, for the incentive is lacking. He is obliged to produce something, because he has an appalling list of theaters to fill. It is perfectly inconceivable that “Jinny the Carrier” should have been even rehearsed. It is a sheer impossibility that anybody could have anticipated success.

Miss Annie Russell, a sterling little artist, deserved all our sympathy. It was sad to see her in these surroundings, battling against the inevitable. Miss Russell can succeed with far less material than many actresses need. Give her half a fighting chance, and she is satisfied. It is pitiful to think of this clever young woman freighted with affairs like “Brother Jacques” and ”Jinny the Carrier,” but it was wonderful to watch her genuine efforts to do the very best she could. There can be nothing sadder in the life of an actress than this struggle with a forlorn hope. When that actress is intelligent, well-read, artistic and up-to-date, as Miss Annie Russell surely is, her plight is even more melancholy. One can scarcely view, in cold blood, this reckless waste of fine talent.

May I pause for a few moments, and say something about the Hippodrome?

The Hippodrome was such a stupendous affair, and its opening took place at such a singularly opportune moment, that a wave of enthusiasm swept over this island. Every dramatic critic in town went to the opening of the Hippodrome, while many of them crept into the “dress rehearsal,” in order to get their adjectives manicured and be ready to rise to the occasion. This in itself was quite unique. As a colossal American achievement, the Hippodrome loomed. It combined spectacle, ballet, specialties, acting, singing, novelty.

In its ballet, particularly, it invited and received the admiration of every lover of art. Nothing more beautiful than “The Dance of the Hours” has delighted the eyes and the ears of this metropolis, that fell in love, at first sight, with its magnificent staging, as the excuse for the lovely music of “La Gioconda.” The Metropolitan Opera House never offered anything so sumptuous. It appealed irresistibly to the artistic instinct. It exploded the fatuous policy that causes the appearance in this city of those senseless, antiquated spectacles – food for neither adult nor juvenile – known as “Drury Lane pantomime,” a form of entertainment that in its native land has begun to languish.

The ballet at the Hippodrome was a revelation, for this city has never taken kindly to ballet, probably for the reason that it has never seen one of genuine artistic merit. A capital performance entitled “A Yankee Circus in Mars” was not a bit less “dramatic” than the alleged comic operas and tiresome musical comedies that have afflicted us with such drear persistence, and it was certainly infinitely more plausible. It had novelty, sensational features and a superb equipment. In addition to all this, there was a wonderful aquatic arrangement, in which the huge stage suddenly sank and gave place to an imposing body of water, wet and ready to receive the plunging horses and riders, as they swam across in the pursuit of their dramatic story.

Two young men, Messrs. Thompson and Dundy, newcomers among the jaded and throttled amusement purveyors of the big city, were responsible for all this, and the greatest credit is due to their “nerve” as well as to their astonishing executive ability. The enterprise at first seemed like some amazing “pipe-dream,” from which there must be a rude awakening, but the opening of the Hippodrome was such a bewildering success, and so unanimously acclaimed, that the croakers were silenced. One of these was exceedingly amusing. He had declared that the Hippodrome must fail. Its colossal results, however, so overwhelmed him that he forthwith announced his belief that New York would patronize two Hippodromes, and his intention of building a second.

The promise that Mr. Kellett Chalmers held out to us in his play of “Abigail,” with Miss Grace George, evaporated in a sad farce, or comedy, entitled “A Case of Frenzied Finance.” We had been flattering ourselves that we had discovered a new “outlook,” and we came a bad cropper. The simian antics of an impossible bell boy, in an impossible hotel, and his maneuvers in the arena of finance, were the “motive” of this extremely invertebrate contribution. There was an “Arizona Copper King”; there was his daughter; there was a gentleman from “Tombstone, Ariz.,” and there were some tourists drawn after the Clyde Fitch style, but with none of his lightness of touch.

It was almost impossible to follow the grotesque proceedings, and utterly impossible to find a gleam of interest in them. One of the characters drank incessantly through two acts, and indulged in the luxury of what is politely called a “jag.” We might have been pardoned for envying it. There are worse conditions, when it comes to the contemplation of such a “comedy” as “A Case of Frenzied Finance.” One suspected satire occasionally, but it was mere suspicion. One was anxious to suspect anything, but I always hold – and I may be wrong – that the best thing to look for, when one goes to the theater, is a play. Perhaps that is an old-fashioned notion.

This strange affair took us back to old times, when we were less sophisticated, but it is not at all likely that “A Case of Frenzied Finance” would have passed muster in the days when we approved and laughed at the works of the late Charles H. Hoyt. There was generally something salient in the Hoyt farces – some happy touch or some hit that “struck the nail on the head.” In the farce at the Savoy, there was much of the frenzy that is usually associated with the padded cell, and that is not, as a rule, enlivening to the outsider.

Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, a very “fresh” young actor, was the heroic bell boy, a very bad advertisement for New York hostelries. He worked harder than any bell boy has ever been known to do, and it seemed a shame to waste so much effort on alleged “drammer.” Mr. Fairbanks might possibly have made more of a lasting success in a real hotel than he will achieve in the spurious affair that was staged. A number of others, in an extremely uninteresting cast, labored ineffectively. Mr. Chalmers completely routed the good impression he had made in “Abigail,” and I should recommend him to “bide a wee” before hurling further manuscripts at susceptible managers – not for their sake, but for his own.

Mr. Paul Armstrong was luckier with “The Heir to the Hoorah.” How true it is that one can live down anything! It should be an inspiring and consolatory thought to Mr. Kellett Chalmers. Mr. Armstrong lived down “The Superstitions of Sue,” which, one might have thought, would have proved to be a veritable old-man-of-the-sea. This is, happily, a forgetful and unprejudiced public, and hope is rarely extinguished.

Although “The Heir to the Hoorah” was freighted with a title so prohibitive that people who attach importance to names might be excused for fighting shy of it, it proved to be a play with so many real laughs in it that criticism was disarmed – one always says that as though criticism started armed, which is absurd! – and joined in the somewhat irresistible mirth. It was a “Western” play, of course. “The Heir to the Hoorah” couldn’t be Eastern. But, by means of the West, Mr. Armstrong was able to get in some amusing episodes that appealed exclusively to the East. Much of it was devoted to parody of that sublime institution known as “evening dress” – popular on Third Avenue as the “dress suit.”

There is nothing really funnier. Of course we are accustomed to it. Our souls may rebel at its exigencies, but unless we happen to be millionaires, we cannot afford to flout the conventions. We wear the “evening dress” because we have been taught that it is respectable and seemly. In “The Heir to the Hoorah” a number of miners and “rough diamonds,” in “a mining town east of the Divide,” were portrayed in their struggles with civilization.

It was very droll. Dave Lacy, Bud Young, Mr. Kelly, Bill Ferguson, Lon Perry and Gus Ferris, all gorgeously uncouth, as far as externals go, made an admirable onslaught in the direction of the “dress suit.” “Immaculate evening dress,” as we call the garb of a man who is rigged up in imitation of the elusive but energetic restaurant waiter, has rarely been more humorously attacked. This feature went much further than did the story of the play. But it served to put an audience in such a good humor that the somewhat trivial play itself seemed better than it really was. Certainly no European playwright could have seen the ludicrous possibilities of evening dress as amusingly as Mr. Armstrong did. Perchance Mr. Bernard Shaw might have done so, but his cynicism would have marred the prospect. There was no “pose” in the humor at the Hudson Theater.

The play had the advantage of being well acted. We often complain that leading actors cannot wear evening dress gracefully. This time they had to do their worst for it, and were asked to wear it as ungracefully as they could. They were able to do it. Most of them were comparatively unknown, but they were none the worse for that. John Drew or William Faversham or Kyrle Bellew could not possibly have pilloried evening dress as did the actors in “The Heir to the Hoorah.”

“The Firm of Cunningham” succeeded “Mrs. Temple’s Telegram,” at the little Madison Square Theater, but did not prove to be a worthy successor. It was from the pen of Mr. Willis Steell, who rushed in where angels fear to tread; or, in other words, invented a couple of complex ladies, and then tried to explain them plausibly. There is no more difficult task. One lady was a skittish matron, addicted to betting on the races and to allowing a nice looking boy to kiss her; the other was a white-muslin girl from Vassar, who fell in love with that boy at remarkably short range.

It was very unsatisfactory. One woman was a cat, with whom we were supposed to sympathize; the other had many of the characteristics of a fool. Why label Vassar for the latter? It was, however, the married woman who was the “heroine,” and a key to her character was never supplied. I like a key to complex ladies, and am not a bit ashamed to admit it. I want their motives a-b-c’d for my use, in the case of plays like “The Firm of Cunningham.” When complex ladies figure in masterpieces, than the key is unnecessary, and what you don’t understand, you can always ascribe to the “psychological.”

Miss Hilda Spong, a clever actress who is always miscast and who is rarely able to display her fine qualities, was this contradictory “heroine,” while Miss Katherine Grey, usually assigned to dark melodrama, was the white-muslin girl with the Vassar mis-label. William Lamp, as the boy who kissed, was possibly the best member of the cast, that also included William Harcourt and Henry Bergman. “The Firm of Cunningham” scarcely seemed built for “business.”

A SEA SHELL

Behold it has been given to meTo know the secrets of the sea, —Its magic and its mystery!And though, alas, I may not reachThe clear communicable speechOf men, communing each with each,I have such wonderment to tell,Such marvel and such miracle,I needs must strive to break the spell.Hence do I murmur ceaselessly;And could one but translate me, heMight speak the secrets of the sea!Clinton Scollard.

FOR BOOK LOVERS

By Archibald Lowery Sessions

Two recent books that deal with a theme familiar enough to novel readers, but always stimulating. “The Garden of Allah,” by Robert Hichens, and “The Apple of Eden,” by E. Temple Thurston. Charles Carey’s “The Van Suyden Sapphires” a good detective story. Other books.

Two recent books are worthy of something more than casual notice for reasons entirely unconnected with the question of their literary merits, for they afford some material for reflection upon the curiosity of coincidences and for speculation as to the value of the priest in love as a character in fiction.

It is not to be supposed that undue significance is given to these aspects of the appearance of the books in question, for no important deductions are to be drawn from their nearly simultaneous publication; it is not especially remarkable as a coincidence. It is, however, an interesting fact that two novelists as gifted as the authors of these two books have shown themselves to be should have been working out the same theme in very much the same manner, and presumably at approximately the same time.

The opportunity of the cynical critic is, of course, obvious, and he will, if he thinks of it, lose no time in exclaiming that the most remarkable thing about it is that the books should have found publishers at all, and add, sourly, that if all similar coincidences were brought to light by publication, the condition of English fiction would be more hopeless than it is.

But the cynic would be wrong, as usual. If it is admitted that the new books of Mr. Hichens and Mr. Thurston are not “epoch-making,” it still remains a fact that they are as nearly so as any of the books of the year; they narrowly miss the standard which entitles them to be genuine and permanent representatives of English literature.

No one needs to be reminded that love stories, in which the lovers are required to surmount all sorts of obstacles, are common enough; one of the chief difficulties in supplying the demand is to create obstacles of the sort that will stand the test of plausibility and yet add a reasonable means by which the hero and heroine may overcome them, for the distracted couple must live up to what is expected of them, and their romance must be molded by the practical maxim that nothing succeeds like success – success meaning that their final happiness must be in conformity with the necessities of conventional morality; their union either blessed by the church of their faith or confirmed by law. And it might be added that the reader, in the majority of cases, will be conscious of a sense of uneasiness unless the happy outcome is effected not only with his own approbation, but with that of the conscience of each of the lovers. If any question of right and wrong is left unsettled for them, the reader remains dissatisfied, no matter what consideration of principle he may himself feel justified in disregarding.

A man devoted to celibacy, by vows voluntarily made to the church which he looks upon as his spiritual director, who finds himself in love with a woman, in the nature of things presents an attractive problem to a novelist – probably because the solution is so difficult; to be sure, the theme is not altogether new, but it possesses an interest that is never wholly satisfied; it suggests all sorts of dramatic possibilities; it supplies material for an intense climax, and it provokes discussion.

People will differ about what a man’s duty is under such circumstances, and the question will be asked whether his allegiance is due to the church or to the woman who returns his love, overlooking what may perhaps be the fact that it is not so much a question of loyalty to the church as of loyalty to conscience; a foolish consistency, possibly “a hobgoblin to little minds,” but, nevertheless, one to be weighed in the consideration of the story’s artistic merits.

Whatever the outcome of the conflict between conscience and inclination, whether the old conception of duty is confirmed or is abandoned for a new one, there remains the same difference of opinion. Is the man weak or strong? Is his decision in conformity with the familiar facts of human nature? Is it natural that his love for his church should outweigh his passion for the woman? And is the woman likely to acquiesce in the destruction of her hopes?

It is discouragingly seldom that a book comes to the reviewers’ hands, which, by its virility and its honest merit as literature, in the old and true sense of the word, rises as high above the average as does “The Garden of Allah,” which Robert Hichens publishes through the Stokes Company; and it is because it truly possesses these qualities that it gives promise of a life of appreciation which will outlast many other volumes in the year’s crop of fiction.

In the consideration of such a book the motive power, the plot, is hardly of moment – it is the workmanship, and what one might term the self-conviction of the novelist, that counts. After all, the story of the renegade monk and his earthly love, culminating in marriage, is not unusual; one foresees the ultimate solution of this problem – his renunciation of the world and his return to his monastery. It is a theme which has engaged the pen of writers time out of mind – but it is safe to say that never has the theme been handled with such mastery, with such keenly sympathetic character delineation and analysis, as that with which Mr. Hichens has handled it. His craftsmanship, his insight into and understanding of human nature and the forces that mold it – the intangible forces of the earth and air, the minute happenings of one’s daily life that, in themselves, are too likely to pass unregarded, but work so powerfully and well-nigh irresistibly upon the spirit of men and women – all this is superb and thorough.

His literary generalship amounts almost to genius approaching that of the great masters of fiction. Indeed, if any fault can be found with the book, it is that it is too painstakingly complete; nothing is left to the imagination – or, rather, the imagination is forced by the essence of eternal truth that seems to form each phrase and sentence, to comprehend all, down to the least detail; and a thorough reading of the book leaves one with the sense of physical fatigue, as if the reader himself had experienced the violent and terrible ordeals of the soul that were the portions of the actors in this drama of the African desert.

Whether or not it would have been wiser for Mr. E. Temple Thurston to have published his new book, “The Apple of Eden” – Dodd, Mead & Co. – under a nom de plume, is largely, if not wholly, a commercial question. Those who have shown a disposition to belittle it on account of the interesting but irrelevant fact that he is the husband of the author of “The Masquerader,” have exhibited small powers of discrimination and missed an opportunity to do justice to a remarkable book, for such it unquestionably is.

The book is a very keen study of character; one of the sort that could be made only by a close observer of human nature, accustomed to the analysis of motives and to the due apportionment of their elements.