Visit other so-called “Little Theatres,” my friends, and you will understand why the Uranian had to make so long a journey. For there is none like this. They are either—those others—too gaudy and “artistic”; or they are too shoddy, ramshackle, littered, patchy and “bohemian.” This is the place; the place where one can draw large even breaths; the place where one can cool one’s fever; the place where one can drink, as Shelley says, “of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill.”
And it matters not what they are “playing,” this gracious company of Our Lady’s Servants, or whose liturgical “Use” they honor with their acceptance. Many are such “hours,” such “offices.” It makes no difference. One Gregorian Harmony brings them into the circle of One Rhythm. Many and diverse are the offerings they offer up to that great Goddess. Some are wanton and capricious, some grave and solemn, some foreign and exotic, some native-born and natural, some from the market-places of this very city, some from the far-off land of the Goddess’s own engendering; some light as gossamer-seed, from no land at all, but from the kingdom of airy nothings, sans habitation, sans name, sans purpose!
Yes, whatever the words of the “local breviary” we persuade them to adopt to their music, the effect of it upon the listeners is the same. “Razed out” at last are those “written troubles”; “cleansed” at last, of “that perilous stuff,” is the poor “stuff’d bosom”!
Chicago’s Little Theatre is the real “Alsatia”—the authentic “Arcanum”—the true “Hesperidean Grove”! And do you ask how it rose, “like an eschalation,” into being—what hands built it—what genius, what magic, still sustains it? What, do you suppose, questioner at the gate, worked this miracle? What, do you surmise, wrought this spell? Have you really no inkling, in this sphere of the raising of Altars, how such things are done?
Only in one way! There is only one kind of occult adventure—Goethe tells us that—by means of which these Euphorions of Beauty grow into life! There must be the creative spirit of Man, giving the thing “Form”; and the creative spirit of Woman, giving the thing “Color.” Thus we understand. Thus we unravel the mystery. Thus we learn how the impossible happens! Look, inquisitive Stranger, at the Inscription over the entrance to this enchanted retreat. Read the names written upon the door. Do you catch the trick of it now—do you glimpse the clue? Two names are there—our Faust’s and our Helen’s—and behind those two names lurk the creative genius that wills, and the creative genius that gives color to what is willed. Thus the miracle is accomplished. And behold—Euphorion! For English “Maurice” and American “Nelly” have that inestimable bond, between the links of which alone can the true Parnassian Hyacinths put forth their “hushed, cool-rooted flowers” for the delight of gods and men;—I mean agreement of “opinion,” with diversity of “temperament.”
The supremely happy “chance” of the coming together of these two—why not believe the legend that gives to the very Land of the Muses the spell that achieved it?—resulted in nothing less than that indescribable synthesis of Man’s Intellect and Woman’s Instinct which is the desire of the ages! So ought human beings to be united. So ought their poor mortal “love,” radiating from Zenith to Nadir, to provoke the return of Saturn, the unbinding of Prometheus, the Vita Nuova for which we all pine!
It is in fact the presence of our “New Helen” as the guiding, balancing, mellowing, sweetening influence, in this enterprise, which has enabled the austere “Formula” of the Founder to take to itself flesh and blood. For the director of the Little Theatre of Chicago is no Dilettante—no Petit-Maître of a pompous coterie—no bric-à-brac Virtuoso. Stern and high and cold is his Ideal; clear and clean-cut the lines that limit it! To reproduce in the heart of the great mad City—the City of the “Middle-West”—the City of America—that Rhythm and Harmony which Plato felt as the secret of the ultimate spheres, is not such a thing worthy of the gift of a man’s life?
And it is nothing less than a man’s life, and a woman’s too, which is being given for this. For such temples are not built without the shedding of blood. Those who have ears to hear let them hear! As the wise Lady says, who comes from the Isle of the Saints, “The Bridge to the World’s Future hides within its arches the bodies of the World’s First-Born!” It is not for any “strayed reveller,” however sensitive to what he has seen, to give the word of Initiation to these devoted ones’ long-labored Mystery. Maurice Browne’s methods may be seen, and the passionate irritability of his over-tasked nerves may be teased and rung upon; but the high invisible walls of the Citadel he is raising—the “topless towers” of his Ilium—are not for the searching of the profane. And yet a modest guess may be hazarded as to where, in our horizon, those towers will grow. They will grow, as all true classical ramparts have grown, protecting us from the hordes of vulgarity, out of the ground and soil of inveterate tradition. They will not grow to the tune of the idealization that spurns “reality,” they will grow to the tune of the idealization that sifts, selects, winnows, purifies, and heightens “reality.” They will not be built, they are not being built, according to the fierce fanaticism of any particular School or Cult or Pass-word. The sub-soil of their tradition has been watered by no tears but those of Humanity, and will be sown with no harvest but the harvest of Humanity. If they are more Greek, or more Hebraic, than anything else, that is only because to the Greeks and the Jews rather than to the rest it has been allowed to sweep the unessential absolutely aside and return with clear-eyed innocence to the main facts. Maurice Browne is not the slave of Euripides—though, by God! some might think so—nor is he the slave of the Bible. It is only that he knows too well—too well for his peace and the peace of his friends!—that only from the depths of that one tragic fountain—the naked human heart, my friends—spring the little opal-tinted bubbles that reflect the World!
What has been revealed to our modern Faust in those queer “absences from the Body,”—what has been revealed to him in those hours, when his nerves find us so hard to bear—what “the Mothers” have really whispered to him—who were bold enough even to guess? But this much a poor Satyr of the Outer Court may without impertinence divine. For Maurice Browne the whole world resolves itself into an act of worship. The thing worshiped we know nothing of, save in the eternal rhythm of life; and the “other worshippers” we know nothing of, save in the music which responds to that rhythm; but the whole drama—down the long desperate centuries—resolves itself into nothing less than an attempt to attune to reciprocity those two cadences—the voice of the Unknown World-Priest, intoning through the ages, and the voice of the innumerable generations answering! Have I been able in the remotest degree to indicate why to the good sneering philistines who mock at all this and ask “what is a Little Theatre but—a Little Theatre”? there may come some day a somewhat ghastly awakening, a somewhat damning remorse? In that hour—in that “Judgment”—happy will those citizens of Chicago be who have prepared the way, and not laid themselves down in the way, of the builders of the Abbey of Thelema!
What The Little Theatre is doing is nothing less than a restoration to the worship of the Eternal Gods of an Institution which has been bastardized, perverted and profaned! Think what the Drama in our days has become! Think what “buyers and sellers” have set up their “tables” in the Lord’s House! The Theatre, in our generation, is no more that sacred stage where Life is purged and winnowed and heightened; and where, out of the Tragedy and Comedy of it, clear triumphant music is made audible. Poetic Drama is extinct. And yet can Life be said to be even approximately mimicked by anything less than poetry? Emotions we have enough of and to spare—emotions and sensations! But these are not poetry. These are but the heavy, raw, crude, chemical protoplasm of poetry. Thus the only plays of our time which are beautiful and successful and true to the life-instinct are Farces. Farces need not be poetical. They represent the kicking up of satyr-heels round the outer circle of the Dionysian grove. They represent the insurgent rebellion of the humorous mob against all law or rule. And as such they are admirable. As such they have their place. Indeed they are all that is left of admirable in our modern Theatre. They are our only contribution to this world-old act of worship—the contribution of beautifully kicking up our heels! Putting aside Wagner and Strauss and half-a-dozen Latin Opera-Makers, what has our stage got which really answers to the religious exigency of which I am speaking? Nothing but Farce, nothing but Satyr-heels! Devoted revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan restore to us our youth once in a long season and Fanny’s First Play and Pygmalion hit our tired heathen fancy. But for the rest—! Hyperborean morbidities technically adjusted to bourgeois drawing-rooms with snow-avalanches muttering at the window, are indeed enough to make unlaid troublesome ghosts of the great psychological names of Ibsen and Strindberg. But psychology, whether it dissect the old Bourgeois Family or the New Feminist Lure, is, after all, only a transitory analysis of ephemeral situations. It does not spring from what, in the relations between Man and Woman, is eternal and unchangeable. It does not turn into dramatic poetry the long cry of our common fate. The pathological “macabrism” of Ibsen and Strindberg dissolves like mephitic scum when the eternal constellations, under which Job and David and Sophocles wrote, mount up through the deep hushed air. Mr. Browne has an artist’s and an Irishman’s passion for Synge—but he knows better than we could tell him that gaelic Mythology is not classical Mythology and gaelic poetry is not Universal poetry. And so we return to the one old Path—the one undying Tradition. We literally return to it. For, after all their lovely and alluring experiments in a hundred directions, the great work of The Little Theatre—until Mr. Browne writes his own epoch-making Poetic Play—is, as we all confess, the revival of Euripides. It is here and only here that The Little Theatre of Chicago rouses itself, through every nerve and vein of its corporate body, to grand and undistracted reciprocity. And here we are in the presence of a true Renaissance: a Renaissance as authentic and deep as that which the fifteenth century stumbled upon. The truth of what I am saying will be sealed, for the few who understand this “open secret,” by the fact of the instinctive preference displayed, not only by the director but by the whole company, for The Trojan Women, over the less universal, the less classical, the more modern Medea.