The master himself was the glorious vulture of war. Looming there on the stage of the Little Theatre, black, huge, alone under a vast orange sky heavily streaked with black, a violet light from somewhere touching the crimson of his face—and beside him in that great lonely cosmos an iridescent emerald bowl upon a high ivory pedestal. That little, little iridescent bowl, the ivory, the vast peace of a universe, no coagulating clots hanging from the shreds of bodies torn and entangled in the barbed wire meshes of the trenches, no cries—only one huge black moving thing there.
“War a great evil and an unmitigated wrong? I cannot see it. A pacifist struggle for existence is only a meaner struggle. They are fools who think it advisable or possible to stamp out war; they are knaves if, thinking this possible or advisable, they still go on a pacifist crusade.”
Followed then the picture of a well-managed nation during war, a regime of exalted socialism—the pooling of all moneys, the raising of the income tax, the rich paying for the needs of the poor; she who was once thought a bedraggled hussy of London’s east end now become a savior of her country, in her potential gift of a son to the recruiting office of her country; the high price now set on flesh and blood, even that of the most humble.
Well, all this heroic joy and thin-ice socialism—it was announced at the end of the evening that the week after the subject would be Walt Whitman. Thank heaven! Let his people listen to John Cowper Powys on Walt Whitman. Of these he should speak—of Walt Whitman, of Oscar Wilde, of Huysmans and Richepin and Milton and Ficke and Baudelaire and Goethe and Shakespeare. On these he speaks divinely. Peace and war indeed!
And the debate? There stood Maurice Browne in valiant opposition, really “the idealist and fanatic” as his opponent called him, not adding “the clear thinker,” the rejector of temptations to revel in obvious and facile romanticisms on the sweet decorum of dying for one’s country, with all the talk of defending one’s beloved from the hand of the ravager. There were even those who understood Mr. Browne when his bravery and his prophetic sight let him dare to say such things as “It is better to be killed than to kill. To refrain from a combat of violence when the victims might be your dearest ones is not to put a finger in the cogs of God’s orderly universe. It is a question of looking the God that is within you in the face.” As for the merits of the debate, the matter of war and its avoidableness was not touched on in its practical aspects, except by one who presided over the meeting and in three intelligent moments discussed the economic and the proved sides of war. The Little Review is no tract, and we may pass that by as understood.
And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! The vote was on the merits of the question.
The Theatre
THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PLAYERS
Saxe Commins
Were I a self-appointed apologist for the Washington Square Players I might be able to say with gracious fairness that “their works are not worth as much as their endeavors but their endeavors are heroic.” But I am not inclined to pardon these enthusiasts whose enthusiasm has become cautious, whose ideals are inoffensive, whose outlines are blurred by an undiscerning dilettantism, who in the absence of a dominant individual characteristic flounder helplessly through an unbalanced, inartistic program, that is only relieved, fortunately, by Mr. Phil Moeller’s delicious satire Helena’s Husband.