Patriots
ON THE “7:50”
Parke Farley
As you go in and out upon the train,
You’re always reading poetry?
... Yes.
At first it slightly did embarrass me
To have the people stare,
Like you, over my shoulder,
Catching, as it were, a sudden flashing thigh,
Or gleam of sunlight on a truth laid bare,
Then sizing me up from the tail of the eye.
I used to shield the books, and myself, too,
But now I have grown bolder—I don’t care ...
They say this morning train from Lake Forest to Chicago
Carries more money, more living money
Than any train of its length and size in the world.
There’s the Club car, for Bridge, and then the Smoker,
And four or five other coaches.
It makes one feel rich merely to ride upon it ...
No, it’s not Keats or Shelley—yes, well enough,
But these are living.
I like them young and strenuous,
And when I find one that has done with lies,
I send a word ...
“Change” at the Fine Arts Theatre
DeWitt C. Wing
Your enthusiastic welcome of Change, published in the April number of The Little Review, compelled me to see the play, and I hasten to report a memorable evening. Have you ever heard the hard, sharp, battering, hammering of an electric riveter used on a steel bridge? Change has a punch like that, and every punch is a puncture. No kind of orthodoxy can resist it.
I have never spent a dozy moment in the Fine Arts Theatre. I shall never forget Candida, Hindle Wakes, Miles Dixon, Prunella, Change, and other dramas and tragedies that I have witnessed there. I shall not even forget Cowards. Chicago some day will reproduce and expand the truth which a dozen plays have driven into the souls of people who have sat in that beautiful little room. Whatever the commercial outcome of an attempt to present beauty and truth as expressions of life, the management has already achieved a noble success. Hundreds of men and women will always remember the Fine Arts Theatre as an inner shrine of authentic art, where the furthermost reaches of the human spirit in the fiction of plays have touched and quickened the heart of reality.
Change represents an ever-new voice rising above the rattle of inevitable dogma and decay. It rings true to life. Even its name is profoundly appropriate as a label for an inexorable law. If a play reveals splendid thinking I am almost indifferent to what in that case becomes largely the incident of acting, for to be engrossed in enforced thought is to lose that narrow vision of the outward eye which merely looks on a performance. One is not then an onlooker but a discoverer. Change was hard, subtle thinking plus admirable interpretative acting. Like the Irish and English players who have appeared in the Fine Arts Theatre, the Welsh company who recently gave us this trenchant criticism of life endowed the word “acting” with a fresh significance. One does not think of them as players; they impress one as re-livers of the life that they portray. That is art of a high order. If we Americans are proud of our wealth and wonders, we must bow in humility when we consider that the biggest plays that we have seen and the best acting that we have witnessed are not of domestic authorship. They are imported, and we have enjoyed them at the Fine Arts Theatre in Chicago.
Change is in four acts, written by J. O. Francis. It was awarded the prize offered by the Incorporated Stage Society of London for the best play of the season. The scene is in a cottage on the Twmp, Aberpandy, in South Wales. The time is the present. A tragic change occurs in a family, whose head was a collier. It is a kind of drama that might inspire the private regret that the tragic martyrdom of Christian fanatics is no longer in vogue, and offers a species of justification of summarily removing human obstacles. Who among real men wouldn’t have an impulse to take an active hand in ridding life of a suppressive old barnacle like John Price? He and his conscience and his God stood against the primal law of change, with blind passion and colossal selfishness. If his sons John Henry and Lewis had mangled him I should have admired their passion. Gwen Price, the wife and mother, suffered more than all because she was capable of suffering; I did not wish a change on her account; she was a woman. Her suffering and weakness were her triumph and strength. Besides, she was not at war with life as she saw it in her sons. Her love was great and wise enough to confer tragic beauty and adorn a soul; that kind of love is the supreme religion.
What John Price felt and expressed as religion was a contemptible mental narrowness and spiritual poverty; a counterfeit religion based upon fear and hardened by ceremonial practice. Its one virtue was that it offered the most formidable opposition to the unfolding of manhood in two young men. Youth is ever pushing its entangled feet down against the hard substrata of anterior generations. Too often it is stuck and gradually smothered in the upper mud, which solidifies as insidiously as it forms. A man who can be held by dying or dead impedimenta is himself dead. A man who struggles out and stands triumphant upon it, with the antennae of his being reaching up and out for the widest and finest contacts, fulfills destiny by adding a golden grain of solid value on which a succeeding aspirant for a larger life may stand that much higher on the old foundation. The man who conforms, remains in and a part of the common level, plastically flattens out like dough under a rolling pin, merely fulfills the law of the indestructibility of matter and the conservation of mass. Whereas youth’s great dream is symbolized by the over-topping king of the forest, standing stiff-spined and straight upon the old earth, its head in rare aloofness, the ease-lover functions as a lowly parasite.
With wild winged thoughts of which these remarks are vague memories I took Change in my consciousness from the theatre. No thoughtful person could have returned unchanged from the playhouse. The transitoriness of religions, institutions, customs, and all other so-called fixtures which constitute modern civilization is the tremendous fact that makes Change a powerful supplement to social forces. Of course to the modern mind the idea is already old, but to the primitive majority it is a prophecy.
The author tempered his mild radicalism with the hard-headed sagacity of Sam Thatcher, a one-armed pointsman, who, while unintellectually aware of the changelessness of change, “figured it out” that life is cyclic; that as experience broadens the attitudes of men they lose their little individualities in a common resignation, defeat, and decay, which to him meant contentment. “I’ve been round the world some—round and round. That’s how things go—round and round—I know, round and round.” Sam thus epitomized an old theory which has so many supporters that it must be wrong. But if we do not go “round and round” in what direction do we go? Nobody knows. If our movement is circular there is the desperate possibility of sufficient momentum to gain new territory by virtue of centrifugal force. We can at least make the circle larger. Races have bloomed, fruited, and passed; planets have shone for an abbreviated eternity and disappeared; baffling facts about life-forms upon the earth have come to light. Our conscious life is young, densely ignorant, and full of pain; our instinctive life is ageless, has perfected its knowledge and can endure, as it has endured, the aeons of change. We shall some day get the idea of change into our consciousness.
Unthinkingly one might regret that Sam was clever enough to sway back toward dogma those wavering minds which might otherwise have yielded to the drama’s punches. But his pathetically amusing romance should have made it clear to respectable auditors flirting with new ideas that he was not a competent critic of their particular class-slice of life. What he said was reassuring, assuaging, brilliantly trite, and an untroubled mind would take it and reject the austere, burning truth of the essential message of the play.
“Naught may endure but mutability”: Shelley thus expressed what every educated man knows. Change is the unvarying order, and yet we are constitutionally averse to it. Comfortable people dislike it. “All great natures love stability.” Why do we make John Prices of ourselves? (I think that H. G. Wells, more than any other literary man, has lived in consonance with the law of change.) An expanding knowledge precludes constancy. All John Prices are obscurantists. Convictions and blind faith based upon glorified ignorance have for thousands of years encysted, cramped, and twisted personal life, but somehow it has burst through the fetters and arrayed itself for successive struggles. Analyzing what we see and know, and confessing what we think we feel, we have the ancient riddle before us. We applaud a play like Change, but seek security and stability in every relationship. Eventually every man must feel what Rousseau wrote: “Everything in this world is a tangled yarn; we taste nothing in its purity, we do not remain two moments in the same state. Our affections, as well as bodies, are in perpetual flux.” Maybe Sam Thatcher was wise, but if we knew that our life were cyclic the joy of it to us would cease. The wiser man does not know so much as Sam professed, but his endless endeavor is to try to know more. The law of change, which he sees enforced everywhere, increases his insatiability.
It is ultimate questions to which Change gives rise, and to such questions there are no satisfactory answers. The social value of the play lies in the graphic clearness with which it illustrates the slow but epochal shifts that are always under way in thinking individuals, families, and nations.
There is no Rock of Ages in the land of courageous knowledge. Nothing endures but mutability. The purpose of a play like Change is to open the inner mind to this glorious truth, so that with a fortitude born of understanding we may accept misfortune, calamity, and death as the effects of unalterable law, and not as donated penalties or inscrutable accidents. Poise, power, and personality are the fruits of this attitude toward change, and whoever achieves these has climbed out of the “reddest hell”
Armoured and militant,
New-pithed, new-souled, new-visioned, up the steeps
To those great altitudes whereat the weak
Live not.