The popularity of anthologies of verse is now proverbial, and I expect that there will be plenty of attention for the Anthology of American Verse which J. C. Squire, poet and editor of the London Mercury, has completed. The work shows the advantages gained by the onlooker’s standpoint, who can bring to bear a sense of perspective better than our own. The selection also shows Mr. Squire’s fine taste which, so far as I know, has no superior and very few equals among those whose knowledge of poetry would qualify them to be anthologists at all. Another collection of extreme importance but necessarily from a different angle has been completed by Margery Gordon and Marie B. King, and just published under the title Verse of Our Day. As the compilers had distinctly in mind school use of this book in a special edition, as well as the wide popular audience in an edition from which certain textbook features would be omitted, their aim was for inclusiveness and a highly representative quality above all else—though a rigid selection was inevitable, too. The result is a book presenting 347 poems, 225 by American poets and 122 by British. Ninety-two of the Americans and 42 of the British poets are modern—that is, they lie between Eugene Field and Amy Lowell on the one hand, between W. E. Henley and Alfred Noyes and John Masefield on the other. Biographies of the poets, reading lists and, in the school edition, certain guides to study have been included. The popularity of Verse of Our Day ought to be sure and of some permanence.
Henry van Dyke, assisted by Hardin Craig and Asa Don Dickinson, has edited A Book of British and American Verse rather from a standpoint like J. C. Squire’s. “This is not an attempt to make another historical anthology of English verse,” Dr. van Dyke explains. “I have looked only at the value and beauty of the poems themselves.” If some poets were unrepresented, it was not to be helped. “Those that seemed the best have been chosen out of many, not to illustrate a theory, but for their own sake, because they are good to read.” And for those who loved Roosevelt as well as for those who have the anthologist’s interest, there is Roosevelt as the Poets Saw Him, edited by Charles Hanson Towne and containing poems by Kipling, Edith Wharton, Richard Le Gallienne, William Watson, Edgar Lee Masters, Owen Wister, John Hay, Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Bridges.
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Leaving aside all disputes on the score of the drama, one of the best moments of our contemporary literature came a few years ago when it was first known that J. M. Barrie had consented to the publication of his plays. And then when the published plays began to come along, the moment enlarged itself. Here was a man who was practically inventing something, a curious but felicitous compound of novel and drama, a mixture of narrative and dialogue, something that extended far beyond the irrepressible wit and satire of G. Bernard Shaw’s stage directions, priceless as those had been. There was a feeling, with good reason, that by this step Barrie had done more to instate himself with posterity than by anything heretofore. For about the plays themselves, as plays, the controversy is already active; but about the success of the plays as published I know of no dispute or objection. Dear Brutus is the eighth volume in a series which already included A Kiss for Cinderella, Alice Sit-by-the Fire, What Every Woman Knows, Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton and two collections of the shorter plays, Half Hours (“Pantaloon,” “The Twelve-Pound Look,” “Rosalind,” “The Will”) and Echoes of the War (“The Old Lady Shows Her Medals,” “The New Word,” “Barbara’s Wedding,” “A Well-Remembered Voice”). There are good things to come yet, including Peter Pan, and these are in preparation; but much of the best Barrie and best-agreed-to Barrie is now ready to go on the bookshelf (where it won’t stay put very well)—and the best of Barrie is good in any company. For example, The Admirable Crichton, which even the most critical have found strong words to praise. The printed version avoids the fault of the 1918 stage revival in which, as has been said, Barrie dulled or allowed some one else to dull the edge of his perfect satire. For a short and appreciative yet discriminating account of Barrie the playwright, one could not do better than read the chapter upon him in John W. Cunliffe’s English Literature During the Last Half Century (Macmillan: Revised Edition, 1923).
John Galsworthy, the subject of the first chapter of this book, will not, of course, be overlooked by anyone concerned in knowing the best plays of our time. His plays are to be had, complete at present, in five volumes (Plays: First Series; Plays: Second Series, etc.) and a supplementary volume, Six Short Plays. Or, with the exception of the six short plays, each may be had separately. Probably a consensus would select Loyalties, Justice, Strife, The Silver Box, The Pigeon and The Skin Game as his most important and representative dramas.
Arnold Bennett’s new play, Don Juan de Marana, represents one fulfilment of a threefold ambition. Don Juan, together with the legend of the Wandering Jew and the story of Tannhäuser, had attracted him for years as great subjects for drama. A good deal of preliminary work on the Wandering Jew theme was wasted by news that somebody else had written a play on the theme and obtained a production. “I put the Wandering Jew aside for ten years,” explains Bennett. “With regard to Tannhäuser, I am still wondering how to cure Elizabeth of her insipidity, and how to get into the heads of a twentieth century audience the surely obvious fact that music is not an essential ingredient of the tale.” Don Juan Tenorio proved impossible as the basis of a play, but finally Bennett came upon the other, later version of the Don Juan story. “And then I discovered what I wanted in a work on my own shelves, the plays of Dumas père in twenty-five volumes. I ought to have divined that since Dumas wrote plays on everything, he must have written a play on the Don Juan de Marana variation of the Don Juan legend.”
At last all of W. Somerset Maugham’s plays are available for the reader, some ten volumes that include not only The Circle, but Lady Frederick, The Explorer, Jack Straw, etc. It should perhaps be noted here that the play Rain is not a Maugham play, but an adaptation of Maugham’s tremendous short story, “Rain,” included in his book of South Sea tales, The Trembling of a Leaf.
John Dos Passos in his Rosinante to the Road Again, in the chapter on “Benavente’s Madrid,” has conveyed with clearness and much picturesqueness the style and point, the character and perfection of taste in a certain style (lo castizo) with which Jacinto Benavente’s dramas abound. It is this that from their Spanish viewpoint makes them of such distinction; but that would hardly account for their success outside Spain. Larger qualities—a gentle and deadly satire, a nervous vitality, wit—do that; and the visit of Señor Benavente to America a few months ago did much to attract attention to his work. Twelve of his plays, assembled in three volumes in the translations of John Garrett Underhill, are now accessible to the English reader. Benavente represents a more modern Spain than the Echegaray with whose drame passionel those who read plays are sufficiently familiar. He should be read for his own sake and as a Continental dramatist much more distinctly representative of something national, something Spanish in sensibility, than are the outstanding playwrights of other European lands—excepting Russia, no doubt. One can scarcely read Ibsen for Norway, or Strindberg for a little corner of the world; Tchekov is Russia but Andreiev is humanity. Jacinto Benavente, however, is Spain without the sacrifice of those elements which are of importance to a society in any country.
The impressive success of the Theatre Guild is known everywhere, and the Theatre Guild Library is very welcome for its addition of several of the finest of recent plays to the resources of the reading table. The series has been auspiciously begun with publication of Karel Capek’s R. U. R., Ernest Toller’s The Mass-Men, and Elmer L. Rice’s The Adding Machine. A particularly good pick of recent successes will be found in Contemporary American Plays, edited by Arthur H. Quinn and containing Jesse Lynch Williams’s “Why Marry?” Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” Rachel Crothers’s “Nice People,” Gilbert Emery’s “The Hero,” and George S. Kaufman’s and Marc Connelly’s “To the Ladies!”
Of recent books on the drama, Stark Young’s The Flower in Drama: Papers on the Theatre, has attracted wide attention and much deserved praise. Not much more than a year ago Mr. Young, previously a professor of English, began to write his papers on plays, actors, and the theatre in general in the New Republic. His articles and reviews attracted at once the attention of discriminating people interested in the theatre; their admiration was quickly developed by an attitude which showed a comprehending sympathy for what the younger men were trying to do and yet never lost sight of the drama as a developed art with certain inviolable principles. Moreover, he wrote with wit, precision and charm. There is no better reading of its sort, I think, than his “Dear Mr. Chaplin,” his “Circus,” or his “Letter to Duse,” all contained in this volume. Perhaps a note should explain the title, which is based on a sentence: “If one aims only at the beautiful, the flower is sure to appear”—a phrase drawn from Seami, 1363-1444, who, with his father, stood at the head of the No of Japan.