“The New Manner”
(Vague Questionings)
It evidently means—this phrase—“that which is accepted as new”.... There are signs of our dangerously settling down to flat brilliant backgrounds, spots of vivid color, and much mention of “important as decoration”. It seems an unhealthy acquiescence.... “Is desire a thing of nothing, that a five-years’ quest can make a parody of it? Your whole life is not too long, and then only at the very end will some small atom of what you have desired come to you.”—Gordon Craig in his Art of the Theatre. It looks as if we are due for a period of the old, old, three-walled room with the new, new, “new” color.... I don’t believe we will find the future in Michael Carr’s butterfly proscenium and moving-picture screen shadows; but, surely, it is not The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, or Androcles and the Lion, although Barker’s Midsummer Night’s Dream costumes are the most far-reaching originalities yet seen. Nor will it be like A Pair of Silk Stockings, The Sabine Women, Overtones, The Charity that Began at Home, The Taming of the Shrew, nor Urban and his present enormous New York output of “designs” and “follies”. Our only light seems to come from Gordon Craig’s work in Florence. “In his work is the incalculable element; the element that comes of itself and cannot be coaxed into coming”. Or from Sam Hume’s enthusiasm over the “Dome”; Reinhardt, of course, has almost acquired his permanent “angle of repose”—the newness of the American stage being, in fact, the Reinhardt of yesterday. If I had my way, I’d destroy all books about the theatre excepting those of Gordon Craig, for inspiration, or those of Arthur Symons for appreciation.... Then, perhaps, we should begin to understand the Theatre.
Bernhardt on Reinhardt
Sarah Bernhardt has been playing a patriotic play, Les Cathedrales, in London. “It is such a great play I intend taking it into the provinces and then back to London again”, she says. We have said it is a patriotic play; nothing more need be said. Bernhardt plays one of the seven cathedrals, Strasburg. In the interview, quoted above, given to the London magazine, Drawing, Bernhardt has also this to say: “And now, it seems to me that artists in the Allied Countries, and also authors, painters, composers, and all those concerned in the theatre have to bind themselves into a league for removing all traces of German nature and influence from our plays and theatres.... Now the German showman Reinhardt flooded Paris and London with the Berliner deluge of the spectacular. He claims artistic superiority on the grounds of having introduced several novel trivialities. But to trace the real curve of truth I must say that he did nothing of the kind. He merely revived, in Sumurun and Oedipus Rex, certain outworn conventions which existed before his time! But he has not the honesty to acknowledge it.” Later she does say something worth thinking over: “What he has done is to use Eastern methods for Western ideas when he should have used Eastern ideas for Western methods.” Plagiarism is an irrelevant charge to bring against an artist, but acknowledging an artistic right to adaptation means expansion and, despite nationalism, a universal one-ness.
Book Discussion
“And Lesser Things”
“—— and Other Poets”, by Louis Untermeyer. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Very, very clever. The ultimate emptiness of cleverness. These parodies are “not a piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition”,—the poet expects them to approach this “elevated and illuminating” standard; but they never reach satire, which is really the thing that is covered by the above quotation from Isaac Disraeli.
Untermeyer’s verse, including Challenge and that so quantitatively published in the magazines,—still speaking comparatively,—has the same relation to poetry as Urban’s scenery for The Follies has to his Boston Opera settings; or of all of Urban’s work to that of the numerous German poster school of five or eight years ago. Untermeyer is lenient in parodying poets of his own ilk—but it is easy to determine which of those he does not respect by his obvious, spiteful absurdities.