EVENING GIFT
Spread like the palm of a hand
Lies at bottom the evening, gold and red.
Every man may take as much as he likes
Of its beauty, up to the farthest hilltops,
As if it were wine and bread
Handed out to feed hungry souls
And to fill with light the thirsty.
I stroll alone on gentle roads into the splendor
Bathing my face in a thousand rosy waves;
Far away like smoke from a black stack lies my pain.
I know it, yet I wander.
We may, like expectant children, be blessed.
For the New Animal in America
Will Levington Comfort
My enemy has written a book.[1]
This is not man-to-man enmity, but there need be no quibble about it. For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world, against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life, and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of the loss of the love of self.
You will say, “But why this study of T. R. now? Surely he has received his Thumbs-down even from the crowd, and with a unanimity seldom accorded a public man still in the flesh.” ... I am not so sure. I wish I could be sure that his latest message would be shut from the receptivity of this land, as a door upon an evil draught.
We have managed to clump along with bunglers through the recent dropsical years of peace, but there was never such a need as now for a man of vision and power at the forefront of our affairs. These States since August have committed atrocities of short-sightedness and triumphs of selfishness—enough to complicate us for future years. The partisan and the militarist have already made our neutrality unclean. I would like to be sure that their strongest influence has already been encountered.
On our southern borders is war, and our northern border is black with distrust and the British point of view. From Vancouver to Halifax, the voice of this hour is, “If Roosevelt were only in the chair at Washington——” The ensuing part of the “if” covers the present issues from Mexico to Belgium, and the trouble is that Canada knows from England what she is wishing us; at least, in part, the venom and abomination of the saying. To judge from the Press of the States there are still many who would incite afresh the animal efficiency of our country, and who range themselves in the background with this master of the low vibration, calling upon us to answer Europe with a similar desolation.
... How many times have you heard it said, “This T. R. is in the comprehension of the crowd.” This is true. The saddest conviction ever forced into the mind of genius of any age is the opaqueness of the surface which the crowd presents to light or loveliness of any kind. And T. R. is in the comprehension of the bleakest generation which this country has ever known; nor will there ever be another like it, for we are at the end of the night. That which is about to break is either dawn or doom.
T. R. is still searching for the crowd through the endless folds of its obliquity. Who shall say that these folds are not endless; that he may not turn over still another fateful, if momentary allegiance, from the bowels of our materialism?
Enough that he is the voice to-day of the Prussian factor in America, a voice from the throat of the militarists—that curious solution of beef, iron and wine, from which—as Thou seest the Oise and the Aisne and the Vistula flow red—oh, Lord, deliver us!
I hold the conviction that if the militarists ever get in full cry after this country, we shall lose our Peace and our personality. This is an hour to stand by, and it is only in such an hour that I would venture to study a party through the character of its loudest voice. For seventeen years I have watched T. R. stand for the physical and the obvious. There has been more noise about his name in America than about any other, and yet he has never risen to a single great moment. And steadily he has mounted higher in the consciousness of T. R. Many of us thought that the crisis was reached, when for a day (a little before the last presidential nominations) the ego broke within him, and those close at hand saw a deranged creature.... A troop of us camped beside him in Tampa, and followed the Rough Riders afield above Santiago. Perhaps he has a certain animal courage—the cheapest utility of the nations—but there is no moral quality to the courage of a man who would permit himself to be cast into popular approval on a fake.... There was a reunion two years afterward of those same Rough Riders in Oklahoma. T. R. was there, campaigning on the shoulders of McKinley, much as Dr. Cook did. On the way down through Kansas for two days, we heard him on the back platform of the private coach, at every station where two or three would gather together—pouring the most terrific physical energy into political bickerings and half-truths, the same at each station—until we drew the press table as far as possible forward, and bore the oppressive heat with shut windows rather than that repeated clamor of words. He would come in conqueringly, the black coat damp with sweat.... I remember the ruffian exhibition with the cattle—steer-torturing, the brand, the snap of bone, the tightened noose, thud of poor beasts to the ground—all in a frame for him—the hat with the pinned-back brim, waving over all....
No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man.
They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made us a refuge and a brotherhood.
There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The other figment of true national character is the determination of the part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be impossible for you to lose.”
[1] America and the World-War, by Theodore Roosevelt. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]
Maurice Browne and The Little Theatre
John Cowper Powys
Sick of war and discussion of war; sick of “first and last things” and discussion of them; deafened by the raucous howling of the preachers, and dumb before the fathomless stupidity of the mob, one may totter into the cool quietness of The Little Theatre just as Heine, scarcely a century ago, escaped from the madness of the crowd, and in that gallery on the Seine fell at the feet of the armless Goddess! And she smiles at us too—poor unknown strangers—just as she smiled at that famous Wanderer; and though “she has no arms to help,” it is enough if for a little while one can rest at her feet and forget “the voices of hate.” It was by the incantation she has never been known to resist that she was drawn here; to rest, after her long pilgrimage: for here she has found the altar they had lost the secret of building, and the incense they had forgotten how to burn! O the heavenly quietness of this place, and the absence, even round about the purlieus of it, of the voices that grate and jar and harrow and murder!
Favete Linguis! Keep the holy silence, good stranger; till thou knowest completely on what ground thou standest. “Numen inest!” There is Deity in this sanctuary. Do the children of Gath howl with laughter, and the daughters of Askalon shake with spleen, that one should speak of Deity in the Fine Arts Building, and of Altars on Michigan Avenue? Let them put out their tongues—let them spit forth their venom—the stone which they have rejected has already become the head-stone of the temple of the Future!
Visit other so-called “Little Theatres,” my friends, and you will understand why the Uranian had to make so long a journey. For there is none like this. They are either—those others—too gaudy and “artistic”; or they are too shoddy, ramshackle, littered, patchy and “bohemian.” This is the place; the place where one can draw large even breaths; the place where one can cool one’s fever; the place where one can drink, as Shelley says, “of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”
And it matters not what they are “playing,” this gracious company of Our Lady’s Servants, or whose liturgical “Use” they honor with their acceptance. Many are such “hours,” such “offices.” It makes no difference. One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name, sans purpose!
Yes, whatever the words of the “local breviary” we persuade them to adopt to their music, the effect of it upon the listeners is the same. “Razed out” at last are those “written troubles”; “cleansed” at last, of “that perilous stuff,” is the poor “stuff’d bosom”!
Chicago’s Little Theatre is the real “Alsatia”—the authentic “Arcanum”—the true “Hesperidean Grove”! And do you ask how it rose, “like an eschalation,” into being—what hands built it—what genius, what magic, still sustains it? What, do you suppose, questioner at the gate, worked this miracle? What, do you surmise, wrought this spell? Have you really no inkling, in this sphere of the raising of Altars, how such things are done?
Only in one way! There is only one kind of occult adventure—Goethe tells us that—by means of which these Euphorions of Beauty grow into life! There must be the creative spirit of Man, giving the thing “Form”; and the creative spirit of Woman, giving the thing “Color.” Thus we understand. Thus we unravel the mystery. Thus we learn how the impossible happens! Look, inquisitive Stranger, at the Inscription over the entrance to this enchanted retreat. Read the names written upon the door. Do you catch the trick of it now—do you glimpse the clue? Two names are there—our Faust’s and our Helen’s—and behind those two names lurk the creative genius that wills, and the creative genius that gives color to what is willed. Thus the miracle is accomplished. And behold—Euphorion! For English “Maurice” and American “Nelly” have that inestimable bond, between the links of which alone can the true Parnassian Hyacinths put forth their “hushed, cool-rooted flowers” for the delight of gods and men;—I mean agreement of “opinion,” with diversity of “temperament.”
The supremely happy “chance” of the coming together of these two—why not believe the legend that gives to the very Land of the Muses the spell that achieved it?—resulted in nothing less than that indescribable synthesis of Man’s Intellect and Woman’s Instinct which is the desire of the ages! So ought human beings to be united. So ought their poor mortal “love,” radiating from Zenith to Nadir, to provoke the return of Saturn, the unbinding of Prometheus, the Vita Nuova for which we all pine!
It is in fact the presence of our “New Helen” as the guiding, balancing, mellowing, sweetening influence, in this enterprise, which has enabled the austere “Formula” of the Founder to take to itself flesh and blood. For the director of the Little Theatre of Chicago is no Dilettante—no Petit-Maître of a pompous coterie—no bric-à-brac Virtuoso. Stern and high and cold is his Ideal; clear and clean-cut the lines that limit it! To reproduce in the heart of the great mad City—the City of the “Middle-West”—the City of America—that Rhythm and Harmony which Plato felt as the secret of the ultimate spheres, is not such a thing worthy of the gift of a man’s life?
And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is being given for this. For such temples are not built without the shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’ long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the “topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane. And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon, those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens “reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word. The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else, that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!
What has been revealed to our modern Faust in those queer “absences from the Body,”—what has been revealed to him in those hours, when his nerves find us so hard to bear—what “the Mothers” have really whispered to him—who were bold enough even to guess? But this much a poor Satyr of the Outer Court may without impertinence divine. For Maurice Browne the whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest, intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations answering! Have I been able in the remotest degree to indicate why to the good sneering philistines who mock at all this and ask “what is a Little Theatre but—a Little Theatre”? there may come some day a somewhat ghastly awakening, a somewhat damning remorse? In that hour—in that “Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the Abbey of Thelema!
What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables” in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened; and where, out of the Tragedy and Comedy of it, clear triumphant music is made audible. Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? Emotions we have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and successful and true to the life-instinct are Farces. Farces need not be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. And as such they are admirable. As such they have their place. Indeed they are all that is left of admirable in our modern Theatre. They are our only contribution to this world-old act of worship—the contribution of beautifully kicking up our heels! Putting aside Wagner and Strauss and half-a-dozen Latin Opera-Makers, what has our stage got which really answers to the religious exigency of which I am speaking? Nothing but Farce, nothing but Satyr-heels! Devoted revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan restore to us our youth once in a long season and Fanny’s First Play and Pygmalion hit our tired heathen fancy. But for the rest—! Hyperborean morbidities technically adjusted to bourgeois drawing-rooms with snow-avalanches muttering at the window, are indeed enough to make unlaid troublesome ghosts of the great psychological names of Ibsen and Strindberg. But psychology, whether it dissect the old Bourgeois Family or the New Feminist Lure, is, after all, only a transitory analysis of ephemeral situations. It does not spring from what, in the relations between Man and Woman, is eternal and unchangeable. It does not turn into dramatic poetry the long cry of our common fate. The pathological “macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like mephitic scum when the eternal constellations, under which Job and David and Sophocles wrote, mount up through the deep hushed air. Mr. Browne has an artist’s and an Irishman’s passion for Synge—but he knows better than we could tell him that gaelic Mythology is not classical Mythology and gaelic poetry is not Universal poetry. And so we return to the one old Path—the one undying Tradition. We literally return to it. For, after all their lovely and alluring experiments in a hundred directions, the great work of The Little Theatre—until Mr. Browne writes his own epoch-making Poetic Play—is, as we all confess, the revival of Euripides. It is here and only here that The Little Theatre of Chicago rouses itself, through every nerve and vein of its corporate body, to grand and undistracted reciprocity. And here we are in the presence of a true Renaissance: a Renaissance as authentic and deep as that which the fifteenth century stumbled upon. The truth of what I am saying will be sealed, for the few who understand this “open secret,” by the fact of the instinctive preference displayed, not only by the director but by the whole company, for The Trojan Women, over the less universal, the less classical, the more modern Medea.
No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It rises to such a height in its performance of The Trojan Women. And it does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity.
It is not only of “Ilion” we think, it is not only for “Ilion” we weep, in those world-deep choruses; we weep for all the sons and daughters of men, doomed by the same doom, who “must endure”—with Argive Helen—“their going hence, even as their coming hither.” The magical Irish “plummet” of Synge does not, cannot, sound much depth;—and before the bowed figures of those world-mourners, carved as if by the chisel of Pheidias, our pathological Hyperborean Phantoms go squeaking, bat-like, to oblivion.
When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. And when this is seen, and the history of the thing written, The Chicago Little Theatre, its directors and its company, will receive (too late, as always, for personal relief) their delayed appreciation.
It would be unjust, in any such tentative anticipation of Time’s verdict as these pages suggest, to praise Maurice Browne at the expense of those who so wonderfully work with him. We may have our European blood, our European Formalism; but, after all, our stage is an American stage, our company an American company. In estimating the actual contribution of individual members of the company, to the Idea behind it, it were wise to be cautious and discreet. Any praise of a particular performer must needs fall a little discordantly when a certain impersonal rhythmic orchestration is the note of the whole matter. No such faux-pas is risked in the mention of three names. This “Chicago Renaissance” in which Maurice Browne plays the part of the golden-mouthed Mirandola hath also its young Angelo, “seeking the soul” of light and form and color. The work that has been done is so much, after all, a matter of technical inspiration, that to omit the name of Raymond Johnson from its annals were to write the history of Florence without alluding to Michele. Chicago may indeed regard itself, for all its chaotic tumult, as the Tuscan City of America; for nowhere else is so pure a flame, of single-hearted devotion to Beauty, burning on this side of the Atlantic! And with the name of Raymond Johnson, the artist of the company, it is necessary to link that of Edward Moseman, its greater actor. It is strange that it should have been left to a wandering European—and yet perhaps not strange!—to make audible the prediction, which all discerning dramatic critics must inevitably be making in their hearts, that in not so very many years Mr. Moseman will be recognized, from shore to shore, as the most interesting and most personally-arresting player that this country has produced since Booth.
That a genius of his peculiarly idiosyncratic type should have been magnetized—against his will—into the “formalism” of the One Tradition, is about as good an evidence as could be found of the power and conviction of Maurice Browne’s impersonal Ideal!
The third name I may be allowed to mention, without impertinent intrusion into orchestral harmonies, is the name of Miss Vera White. I am not now referring to Miss White’s untiring constructive labor upon what one might call “the architectural scaffolding” of The Little Theatre’s productions. I am referring to her personal genius as an actress. Nothing more natural, nothing more inevitable, nothing more winning and seductive, than this gentle actress’s rendering of the wronged mother in Mrs. Ellis’s Cornish Play could be possibly imagined. And the same enchanting qualities of direct self-effacing emotion will no doubt be even more irresistible when, in a classic role, she comes to play the Nurse in Medea. Of Ellen Van Volkenburg’s own acting in this classic Renaissance which she is helping her husband to summon from “the vasty deep,” I cannot speak; for I have only seen her in those charming “genre” plays where she loves, mischievously enough, to transform herself, like a witch-fairy, into every mortal kind of dream-person! But I know enough of her to know at least one aspect of her October-shadowy moods, which will make us tremble before her Medea!
Well! The Euphorion—the child of this encounter of Past and Present has yet to grow his full wings. He is still a “Ge-Uranic,” a Child-Angel. But those who have had the fortune of being present at the scene of his high engendering will never forget their privilege. “It is a long way” to the shores of Troas from the shores of our Chicago Lake; but for one wanderer at least the great goddess of the Gallery of the Louvre has not worked her spells in vain. Still, with the Elizabethan, we can cry aloud to her through the mists of many journeyings: “Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies.”
Winter’s Pride
George Soule
Intolerant wind, cold, swift over the sand,
An icy-silver sun upon the sea,
Back-spraying plumes of molten white
Wind-lifted from the curling breakers’ tips
That proudly charge the shore with steady roll
And crisping plunge,
The soft advance of foam—
Its million breaking bubbles,
Its elfin rush and tingle;
A thousand gulls awing,
Startled to dipping flight and curving glide,
Their flashing arabesques against the sun
Twisting a thousand beauties never still
Until they rest, fearless, lifted and falling
Upon the surging surf;
And you and I
Striding the flat, resilient sand,
Seeking the distance tirelessly,
Our faces burning,
Our speech of silence made,
In equal freedom joined perfectly,
And our uplifted spirits
Plumed like the waves, exulting with the gulls;
These things are potent
To cleanse us through the years
And to redeem
All dull and sluggard hours;
These things are proof
Of all bright beauty, all swift ecstacy.