A TYPICAL AMERICAN.
David Quixano (Mr. Walker Whiteside) to Herr Pappelmeister (Mr. Clifton Alderson). "I cannot take a fee for playing in your orchestra. I am too Quixanotic to do a thing like that."
AT THE PLAY.
"The Melting Pot."
It is impossible not to respect the earnestness of Mr. Zangwill when he treats of the persecution of his co-religionists in Russia, or their social exclusion in America. But when he appeals to an English audience he is addressing the converted. It is a good many years since the pogram was a popular form of amusement in this country, and at present the Jew is the flattered idol of English Society. It may seem surprising that his play should have had so great a success in the States, where they are not supposed to have a passion for hearing home truths. But then its main theme is the glorification of America as the Melting Pot or crucible into which are flung the wrongs and hatreds and slaveries of the old world, to re-appear in the shape of justice and love and freedom. This is the theme upon which David Quixano, a Kishineff Jew who has lost all his family in a massacre, goes from time to time into an orgy of lyrical raptures. And indeed the swiftness with which the naturalised immigrant, of just any nationality, assimilates himself to local conditions, instantly changing his heart with his change of sky, and learning to wave his stars and stripes with the best of the native-born, must seem miraculous to the ordinary patriot. And here we touch the weak spot in Mr. Zangwill's pæan of the Melting Pot. For those who migrate to America for the sake of its democratic freedom are the few; and those who go there for the sake of its dollars are the many; and into the Melting Pot—or, to use an image more apposite to indigenous tastes, its Sausage Machine—are thrown not only the wrongs and hatreds of unhappy races but also the dear traditions of birth and blood and family ties and pride of country, to emerge in a uniform pattern without a past.
For his plot, Mr. Zangwill relies upon a very stagy coincidence. Quixano falls in love with a young Russian girl who conducts a Settlement Home in New York, and conquers her prejudice against his race, only to find that she is the daughter of the very officer who permitted the massacre at Kishineff in which Quixano's family had perished, and himself been wounded. In turn he naturally has his own prejudices to conquer, and does so. But not till he has scared us with the fear that he is going to be false to his theory of purification by process of the Melting Pot.
Mr. Walker Whiteside, who plays the part, was excellent in his quiet moods, and when he was obliged to rant was no worse than other ranters. The superb solidity of Mr. Sass as the Russian officer served as an admirable foil to the mercurial methods of Quixano. Miss Phyllis Relph as the heroine mitigated the effect of her obvious sincerity by a bad trick of showing her nice teeth. Mr. Perceval Clark, as a young American millionaire, was pleasantly British. Humorous relief of a cosmopolitan order was provided by the Irish brogue of Miss O'Connor; the broken English of Miss Gillian Scaife; the Anglo-German of Mr. Clifton Alderson who played very well as Herr Pappelmeister (Kapellmeister to a New York orchestra); and what I took to be the Yiddish of Miss Inez Bensusan as the aunt of the hero, a pathetic figure of an old lady with firm views about the keeping of the Jewish Sabbath, and a pedantic habit of celebrating with a false nose and other marks of hilarity the anniversary of the escape of the Chosen People from a Persian pogram twenty-five centuries ago.
It might seem from this long catalogue of humorists that frivolity was the prevailing note of the play. But I can give assurances that this was not so. The prevailing note was a high seriousness, culminating in the last Act, when tedium supervened. I attribute my final depression in part to the scene—a bird's-eye view of New York from the roof-garden of the Settlement House. It was impossible to share Quixano's spasm of exaltation in the matter of the Melting Pot as he gazed on this very indifferent example of scenic art.