Clayton Hamilton
The one-act play is an art-form that is worthy of careful cultivation. It shows the same relation to the full-length drama as the short-story shows to the novel. It makes a virtue of economy of means. It aims to produce a single dramatic effect with the greatest economy of means that is consistent with the utmost emphasis. A one-act play, in exhibiting the present, should imply the past and intimate the future. The author has no leisure for laborious exposition; but his mere projection of a single situation should sum up in itself the accumulated results of many antecedent causes. The one-act play, at its best, can no more serve as a single act of a longer drama than the short-story can serve as a single chapter of a novel. The form is complete, concise, and self-sustaining; and it requires an extraordinary focus of imagination.
No other American dramatist has so carefully cultivated this special type of drama as George Middleton. His recently-published volume of one-act plays, entitled Possession, was preceded by two other volumes, called Embers and Tradition. Each of these books contains half a dozen plays. From the fact that Mr. Middleton has chosen to publish these eighteen one-act plays in advance of their production, it is not to be inferred that he is a believer in the closet-drama. A closet-drama may be defined as a play that, being unfit for production in the theatre, is fit only to be locked up in a closet. Mr. Middleton is not a literary amateur, but a professional and practical playwright. He has produced more than half a dozen full-length plays in the commercial theatre; and such artists as Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, George Fawcett, and the late E. M. Holland have appeared in dramas of his composition. All of Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays are written for the stage; and—to quote from his own preface to Possession—he conceives “the value of play publication not as a substitute for production but as an alternative for those whose dramas may offer little attraction to the manager because of theme or treatment.”
At present there is, unfortunately, scarcely any market in the American theatre for one-act plays that take life seriously. It is against our custom to provide a full-length drama with a curtain-raiser or an after-piece; and the field for one-act plays in vaudeville is restricted to slap-stick comedies and yelling melodramas. It is for this reason that Mr. Middleton has been required to choose publication as an alternative for production, in the case of these diminutive dramas. The trouble is not at all that his pieces are unsuited to the stage: they are admirable in technique, and—like all good plays—they would be more interesting in the theatre than in the library. The trouble is only that—for wholly artificial and accidental reasons—the commercial theatre in America at present is inhospitable to the one-act play.
Mr. Middleton’s one-act plays reveal a wide range of subject-matter and a corresponding versatility of treatment. No one of them is similar to any of the others. Yet, pervading this variety of subject and of mood, there is discernible an underlying unity. Each of them deals essentially with woman—and with modern woman in relation to our modern social system. Woman is, at present, a transitional creature, evolving from the thing that man considered her to be in the far-away period of wax flowers and horse-hair furniture to the being that she considers herself about to become in the unachieved, potential future; and Mr. Middleton has caught her in this period of transition, and has depicted her, under many different lights, colored with her virtues and discolored with her faults.
Many of the most poignant and dramatic problems of present-day society arise from the fact that the evolution of woman is proceeding more rapidly than the evolution of her environment. While individuals advance, traditions linger. Mr. Middleton’s favorite subject seems to be a conflict between an advanced woman and a lingering tradition. The author is himself a radical, and his sympathy is forever on the side of the revolutionary individual; but his technical treatment is so fair to both sides of the contention that it remains possible for conservative readers to rank themselves against the individual on the side of the lingering tradition. Scarcely any of Mr. Middleton’s women would be pleasant to have around the house. Since most of them are discontented with the conditions of their lives, they naturally make the worst of these conditions instead of making the best of them. Hell hath no fury like a woman in revolt; and many readers may dislike Mr. Middleton’s heroines more heartily than he seems to like them himself. But to be able to dislike a character is a proof that that character is real, and must be considered as a tribute to the author’s art. The heroine of The Unborn, in Mr. Middleton’s latest volume, refuses to have children because motherhood might interfere with “her work,”—the work, in this case, being merely a habit of attending to minor matters in her husband’s photographic studio; but the intensity of impatience with which the reader listens to her twaddle is an indication that this character is really representative of a silly type of creature that is not infrequently encountered in actual life. Again, in the play called Possession, a woman who has been divorced for adultery attempts to kidnap her little daughter from the house of her former husband, to whose custody the child had, of course, been awarded by the courts. Her adultery was inexcusable, because it had been occasioned not by an irresistible and overwhelming love but merely by a superfluity of leisure; and her attempt to kidnap the child was treacherous and ignominious. She excuses herself, however, by telling her husband that the process of child-birth had been painful, and that, therefore, despite the judgment of the courts, their little daughter belonged more to her than to him. The reader is, of course, annoyed by all this nonsense; but this annoyance, once again, must be regarded as a tribute to the reality of the author’s characterization. No heroine who was not a living human being could make the auditor so ardently desire to climb upon the stage and talk back to her.
Fortunately, it is not at all necessary to like Mr. Middleton’s women in order to like his plays. One may admire Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler without wishing to be married to the heroine; and the pleasant thing about Mr. Middleton’s women is that, while the reader is permitted to observe and study them, he is also allowed to realize with hearty thankfulness that he will never have to live with any of them. The world in which his women move is a world of discontent. This discontent is truly representative of the present transitional period in the evolution of society; but it is not representative of that perennial reality of life that remains oblivious of periods and dates. At all times, the really womanly woman has been a lover of her life and has not found it difficult to feel at home at home.
New York Letter
George Soule
It would be difficult to imagine a more fantastic occasion than a debate in New York on the justice of the cause of the Allies vs. that of Germany between Cecil Chesterton and George Sylvester Viereck. The gods permitted it to happen last week, much to the chagrin of the Allies, for the hyphenated Germans took good care to fill the hall and hiss every offensive statement. Mr. Chesterton, an honest fighter and a clever polemicist, who has leapt through every phase of radicalism into the enfolding charity of the Catholic Church, deserves to be known for his journalistic achievements and his exposure of graft in high places almost as much as for his brother Gilbert. Mr. Viereck, a sublime egotist, has come into sudden favor with his countrymen by editing Das Vaterland, although before that he had taken every known means to secure notoriety for a naturally obscure individual. He began as a poet of strange verse, both in German and English. When it became apparent that it wasn’t going to sell, he issued a last volume which he called his “swan song,” with the announcement that as this commercial age was unappreciative of his poetry he would write no more, and anyone who wanted a last chance to value him at it must buy this book. For himself, he was going to get in line with the genius of the century and become a Big Business Man, for he must make himself felt. He announced in a stentorian wail his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, and was much chagrined when that celebrity would not let him trail along on the skirts of his ample publicity. Later on, when Alfred Noyes began to sell in large quantities, Mr. Viereck resumed his dictatorship of poetry, and by scurrilous attacks attempted to draw Mr. Noyes’s fire—and newspaper space. Now German Patriotism has lifted him to the headlines.