This time, however, as there were only four of us, we sat out under an apple tree. Except for a moment when a tragic passage was interrupted to shoo away a loud-voiced and ill-mannered hen, it was the most nearly perfect theatre I have known.
And the play? It is impossible to do more than hint at the nature of unpublished plays. This one dealt with the “white slave” question, but in a way infinitely superior to the melodrama of The Lure or The Fight. There was another, of subtler treatment, called Deferred Payment, showing the natural retribution seeking out a man who looked for everything in a woman except companionship. Keeping Up Appearances—the one actually produced—pictures a middle-class family engaged in a tragic struggle with the pocket book on account of the false ideals of the community. Justice, written before Galsworthy’s play of the same name, draws a parallel between society’s persecution of a woman who is consecrated to a fine love without marriage, and society’s punishment of the unfortunate victims of prostitution. Mr. Davenport’s best work is in The Importance of Coming and Going, a satirical tragi-comedy which contrasts the exaggerated emphasis we lay on death with the casual way we regard birth. When a person who never should have come into the world leaves it, perhaps gladly, we weep copiously and buy showy funerals; but mothers let their daughters marry any kind of man of wealth or position, without giving them any insight into the mysteries of birth.
Mr. Davenport’s plays do not rank with Ibsen’s or even with Galsworthy’s. But thousands of worse plays have been produced and have succeeded—simply because they contained no ideas. Mr. Davenport is master of a technique which would make it easy for him to write a popular success if he did not insist on saying something. One manager has told him that he is ten years ahead of his time, but that if he were only European his work could be produced. A publisher wrote him that his plays could be issued in book form if he were only well-known. Mr. Davenport’s question, “My dear Mr. ——, how am I to become well known?” has not elicited a reply.
This man’s spirit will remain just as eager and strong as when he began; he may get before the public eventually. Even this year hopeful new plans are under way. But whether he ever succeeds or not, he will have found in life a thousand times more than the obtuse millions who are deaf to him. It would be an insult to offer him sympathy.
And it would be stupid to place final blame on the managers or the publishers, or to think that such things as drama leagues can furnish a fundamental remedy for the apathy of the public. The whole structure of society must be altered, and the quality of the individual human spirit must be quickened, before our leaders can find any adequate reaction in the crowds. We have denied ourselves the artistic stimulus of a cohesive aristocracy. How shall we vitalize our democracy?
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—Goethe.
Some people term a book poor and unreal because it happens to be outside the reality with which they themselves happen to be acquainted—a reality which is to actual reality what a duck-pond is to the ocean.—George Brandes.
The Theatre
Forbes-Robertson’s Hamlet
(Blackstone Theatre)