“I want you to get it the way the audience does.”
He marched his buskined blank verse with the elocution of a poet and all the sonority his raucous voice could lend him. He was shocked to note that Eldon was not helping him along with enthusiasm. His voice wavered, faltered, sank. He was hardly audible at the climax of his big third act.
Here the Puritan hero, who had left the Old World for the New World and liberty, discovered that the other Puritans wanted liberty only for themselves, and so abhorred his principles of toleration that they exiled him into the wilderness, mercilessly expecting him to perish in the blizzards or at the hands of the Indians. The hero, like another Roger Williams, turned and denounced them, then vowed to found a state where a man could call his soul his own, and plunged into the storm.
Vickery closed the manuscript and gulped down a glass of water. He had not looked at Eldon for two acts; he did not look at him now. He simply growled, “Sorry it bored you so.”
“It doesn’t bore me!” Eldon protested. “It’s magnificent—”
“But—” Vickery prompted.
“But nothing. Only—well—you see you said it was a play for me, and I—I’ve been trying to like it for myself. But—well, it’s too good for me. I feel like a man who ordered a suit of overalls and finds that the tailor has brought him an ermine robe and velvet breeches. It’s too gorgeous for me.”
“Nonsense!” said Vickery. “You don’t have to softsoap me. Why don’t you like it?”
“I do! As a work of art it is a masterpiece. The fault is mine. You see, I admire the classic blank-verse plays so much that I wish people wouldn’t try to write any more of them. They’re not in the spirit of our age. In Shakespeare’s time men wore long curls and combed them in public, and tied love-knots in them and wrote madigrals and picked their teeth artistically with a golden picktooth. The best of them cried like babies when their feelings were hurt.
“Nowadays we’d lynch a man that behaved as they did. Then they tried to use the most eloquent words. Now we try to use the simplest or, better yet, none at all. I think that our way is bigger than theirs, but, anyway, it’s our way.