John Cowper Powys on War
Margery Currey
It was a quite, quite dreadful jolt that shook the John Cowper Powys cult on the night of the debate between the master and Maurice Browne of the Little Theatre. The great one, appearing robed in black, through his Delphic, released, blinding vapor clouds of infallible utterance, was to devastate the suggestion that war is evil, avoidable, and should not be prepared for by military methods. Maurice Browne was to defend the suggestion.
Scarce half a moon before had the first murmuring of discontent arisen among the worshipers of the temple, when their idol, beautiful, mordant, flaming, strode forth in flapping black garments and proclaimed that in this great war of many nations “the gall and vitriol and wormwood and uncleanness of mankind are burned, purged from the purified flesh of humanity; that then humanity is transformed, until the passion of hate is hardly distinguishable from the passion of love.”
The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing there.
“War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if, thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist crusade.”
Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the most humble.
Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde, of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!
And the debate? There stood Maurice Browne in valiant opposition, really “the idealist and fanatic” as his opponent called him, not adding “the clear thinker,” the rejector of temptations to revel in obvious and facile romanticisms on the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country, with all the talk of defending one’s beloved from the hand of the ravager. There were even those who understood Mr. Browne when his bravery and his prophetic sight let him dare to say such things as “It is better to be killed than to kill. To refrain from a combat of violence when the victims might be your dearest ones is not to put a finger in the cogs of God’s orderly universe. It is a question of looking the God that is within you in the face.” As for the merits of the debate, the matter of war and its avoidableness was not touched on in its practical aspects, except by one who presided over the meeting and in three intelligent moments discussed the economic and the proved sides of war. The Little Review is no tract, and we may pass that by as understood.
And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! The vote was on the merits of the question.
The Theatre
THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS
Saxe Commins
Were I a self-appointed apologist for the Washington Square Players I might be able to say with gracious fairness that “their works are not worth as much as their endeavors but their endeavors are heroic.” But I am not inclined to pardon these enthusiasts whose enthusiasm has become cautious, whose ideals are inoffensive, whose outlines are blurred by an undiscerning dilettantism, who in the absence of a dominant individual characteristic flounder helplessly through an unbalanced, inartistic program, that is only relieved, fortunately, by Mr. Phil Moeller’s delicious satire Helena’s Husband.
“It is not from what you emancipate yourself, it is for what.”—Let us see whether the Washington Square Players have really liberated themselves from the Broadway tradition of “getting it over,” from the sacrifice of the artistic for the opportune, and from the fear of offending the generous critics of the New York Press and incidentally a gullible public. “What have they done that has an element of daring, invigorating thought,” was asked of one of the members of the producing staff. “My Lady’s Honor, one of last year’s plays,” was his answer. To those who were unfortunate enough to have seen this pseudo-feminist tract—George Broadhurst supplanting Ibsen in a free theatre—I need not tell what resentment that remark aroused. Nor could those who saw Moondown on the same bill be more antagonized than I was when I heard so fatuous a statement as “If we had more plays like Moondown we would establish the equivalent in America to the Celtic renaissance.” Is this “for what” the Washington Square Players have emancipated themselves? Even if Moondown had any value in itself would they deserve any credit for an aspiration that is only a conditional imitation? I take these casual expressions of members of the organization critically because there is a most noticeable absence of persistent, highly individualized effort, because there is a majority rule, the odorlessness of an insipid mixture prevalent in the atmosphere about the Band Box. They are successful—unfortunately.
Consider the present bill. Has the play-reading committee shown any distinction that differentiates it from those Broadway theatrical agencies that supply syndicated thrills on demand? Have they not arranged their programme without any regard for balance, to the vaudeville formula in this manner: One curtain-raiser on a current topic—of course the war; one play cut and measured for the star, a misfit, to prepare you for the middle piece, in this instance an amazingly clever satire by Phil Moeller; and then the end-up—(Yes, they have outgrown Broadway; they don’t wave a big American flag as a grand finale number)—in this spirit: “wouldn’t a fancifully pagan thing be very nice to show that we have a conception of the beautiful?” Voilà—the whole is the sum of its parts, mathematically accurate, yes; but “who knows whether two and two don’t make five” in the science of Esthetics, if there is such a thing.
Where, I cannot understand, is their proclaimed aspiration of finding plays which fulfill the artistic merit that they would lead us to believe the New York theatre-goer demands? If there is such a public, do they think and choose for them secure in the belief that the patient supporters of these sterile Little Theatre movements will abide such exploitation? Is their complacency so complete that they can disregard every requirement that a “New Theatre” movement imposes and yet get away with it? When I use the term “New Theatre” I mean it in the Strindbergian sense, a new and thoroughly iconoclastic theatre that panders to no opinion, whose merit lies solely in an individual and artistic distinction, a theatre that has something of the “continual slight novelty.”
Fire and Water, the opening play of the bill by Hervey White, is a sacrifice of art to the god of timeliness, an inane argument, an undramatic episode, a virtuous plea against War that permits its author to air some abstractions on brotherhood and equality with utter disregard for the tenseness or the dramatic possibilities of the situation. Broadway knows better. They, at least, are both opportune and spectacular and do not pour forth so much of what Nietzsche calls “moralic acid.”
Night of Snow, by Roberto Bracco, seems chosen ostensibly to allow Mr. Ralph Roeder to cover as great an area of the stage as is possible in forty-five minutes of monotonous gesture to the melodious obligato of a voice ranting second-rate Hamlet self-lacerations. It tells the story of a person half gentleman, half derelict, who likes to cry about it while his mistress and mother indulge themselves to satiation with sickly sweet sacrifice. “I am his Mo-ho-ther” etcetera. What a relief was Moeller’s play—a play that could not even be contaminated by its environment. I think Anatole France would be glad to have written it. Helena’s Husband is much more than an historical interpretation of a phase of the Trojan wars. It is the truth! Moeller is more than clever. He knows as well as France that “history is a pack of lies.”
The Antick, by Percy Mackaye, is a devitalized Pagan attempt which in spite of charming Lupokova was extremely tedious. I heard little of it, so poor was the enunciation of the actors, and for my concentrated attention I was rewarded with an incoherent effort to transplant Pan to barren, colorless New England. I wonder whether Mr. Mackaye ever read Pater’s Denys L’Auxerrois?
At least the Washington Square Players presume to desire, even though it be in a misdirected manner. Will they overcome the affable praise that they get so generously from uncritical critics? Will they mature sufficiently to recognize the mistakes of their infancy? There is still hope that they can be saved from success. Where is the strong, perhaps tyrannical, individual who can do it?