No one who has a real insight into what Poetic Drama means—Poetic Drama the highest of all human Arts—can hesitate for a moment as to where The Little Theatre rises to a permanent and tradition-making height. It rises to such a height in its performance of The Trojan Women. And it does so because here and here alone, by reason of the universal nature of the subject—nothing less in fact than the incarnation of World’s Sorrow—every member of the company is touched and attuned and compelled and transfigured to the same ultimate Pity.
It is not only of “Ilion” we think, it is not only for “Ilion” we weep, in those world-deep choruses; we weep for all the sons and daughters of men, doomed by the same doom, who “must endure”—with Argive Helen—“their going hence, even as their coming hither.” The magical Irish “plummet” of Synge does not, cannot, sound much depth;—and before the bowed figures of those world-mourners, carved as if by the chisel of Pheidias, our pathological Hyperborean Phantoms go squeaking, bat-like, to oblivion.
When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. And when this is seen, and the history of the thing written, The Chicago Little Theatre, its directors and its company, will receive (too late, as always, for personal relief) their delayed appreciation.
It would be unjust, in any such tentative anticipation of Time’s verdict as these pages suggest, to praise Maurice Browne at the expense of those who so wonderfully work with him. We may have our European blood, our European Formalism; but, after all, our stage is an American stage, our company an American company. In estimating the actual contribution of individual members of the company, to the Idea behind it, it were wise to be cautious and discreet. Any praise of a particular performer must needs fall a little discordantly when a certain impersonal rhythmic orchestration is the note of the whole matter. No such faux-pas is risked in the mention of three names. This “Chicago Renaissance” in which Maurice Browne plays the part of the golden-mouthed Mirandola hath also its young Angelo, “seeking the soul” of light and form and color. The work that has been done is so much, after all, a matter of technical inspiration, that to omit the name of Raymond Johnson from its annals were to write the history of Florence without alluding to Michele. Chicago may indeed regard itself, for all its chaotic tumult, as the Tuscan City of America; for nowhere else is so pure a flame, of single-hearted devotion to Beauty, burning on this side of the Atlantic! And with the name of Raymond Johnson, the artist of the company, it is necessary to link that of Edward Moseman, its greater actor. It is strange that it should have been left to a wandering European—and yet perhaps not strange!—to make audible the prediction, which all discerning dramatic critics must inevitably be making in their hearts, that in not so very many years Mr. Moseman will be recognized, from shore to shore, as the most interesting and most personally-arresting player that this country has produced since Booth.
That a genius of his peculiarly idiosyncratic type should have been magnetized—against his will—into the “formalism” of the One Tradition, is about as good an evidence as could be found of the power and conviction of Maurice Browne’s impersonal Ideal!
The third name I may be allowed to mention, without impertinent intrusion into orchestral harmonies, is the name of Miss Vera White. I am not now referring to Miss White’s untiring constructive labor upon what one might call “the architectural scaffolding” of The Little Theatre’s productions. I am referring to her personal genius as an actress. Nothing more natural, nothing more inevitable, nothing more winning and seductive, than this gentle actress’s rendering of the wronged mother in Mrs. Ellis’s Cornish Play could be possibly imagined. And the same enchanting qualities of direct self-effacing emotion will no doubt be even more irresistible when, in a classic role, she comes to play the Nurse in Medea. Of Ellen Van Volkenburg’s own acting in this classic Renaissance which she is helping her husband to summon from “the vasty deep,” I cannot speak; for I have only seen her in those charming “genre” plays where she loves, mischievously enough, to transform herself, like a witch-fairy, into every mortal kind of dream-person! But I know enough of her to know at least one aspect of her October-shadowy moods, which will make us tremble before her Medea!
Well! The Euphorion—the child of this encounter of Past and Present has yet to grow his full wings. He is still a “Ge-Uranic,” a Child-Angel. But those who have had the fortune of being present at the scene of his high engendering will never forget their privilege. “It is a long way” to the shores of Troas from the shores of our Chicago Lake; but for one wanderer at least the great goddess of the Gallery of the Louvre has not worked her spells in vain. Still, with the Elizabethan, we can cry aloud to her through the mists of many journeyings: “Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies.”
Winter’s Pride
George Soule
Intolerant wind, cold, swift over the sand,