In depicting individual sorrow Andreyev approaches Dostoevsky; it is when he raises general, universal questions, that he miserably fails in answering them. The Russian public has “spoiled” him, has crowned him with the title of a genius, when he is only a man of big talent. Unfortunately Andreyev took the flattery of the beast-public seriously; he said to himself: Who knows? Maybe I am, indeed, an Atlas. Let me try and shake the world. And he did try! As a result we have, among his other sore failures, the loudest commonplace—Life of Man.
I think it was Maurice Baring, a Russologue and an admirer of the playwright, who defined Life of Man as an algebraic play, with Man standing for x and Fate for y. Not the tragedy of a certain life under certain conditions, but Life in general, under all circumstances, was the object of the drama. It is the world-old problem, the futility of man’s struggles in the face of blind unreasoning fate that may at any moment overthrow his toy-castles. Perhaps a Goethe might attempt to say something new on that subject, or at least to put it in a new way. With Andreyev the task proved to be not “up to his shoulder,” as the Russians say. The annoying pretentiousness of the play appears a hundred times more convex when on the stage. I saw it once in the “symbolized” theatre of Mme. Kommissarzhevskaya in St. Petersburg, and another time in the performance of the Moscow Artistic Theatre. On the first occasion I was bored to death, and pitied the gifted manager, Mr. Meyerhold, in his futile attempt to veil the platitudes of the play in mysticism, to create an atmosphere, a “Stimmung.” The Moscow people succeeded in emphasizing the ridiculous awkwardness of the drama, the shrill incongruities of the situations and styles,—and I shall ever be grateful to them for the minutes of hearty laughter that they caused me then and which I cannot escape even now, as soon as I recall the harmony between the symbolicized Someone in Gray (sh-sh ...—Fate!) and the super-realistic shrieks of the mother giving birth to a child. The actors did their best, but no miracle could have saved the doomed loud nothingness.
As I have mentioned, Andreyev’s “heel of Achilles” demonstrates its vulnerability when he obeys the call of the public and speaks on up-to-date topics. Life of Man was written, evidently, in response to the symbolistic moods that became noticeable among Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. For more than ten years the group of Symbolists, under the leadership of Valery Brusov, had been ridiculed and unrecognized. Then came the reaction: All began to talk symbols; the press, the stage, the art galleries, the public lectures, became symbolistic over night. A torrent of parodies and imitations gushed on the market, and the public did not differentiate between the real and false coins. It became bon-ton to quote Brusov, Balmont, Viacheslav Ivanov, Sollogub; schoolboys declaimed about “the ostrich feathers that wave in my brains,” and janitors whined to “the moon, in a white bonnet with embroidery.”
Life of Man reaped broad success, a fact that speaks volumes on the taste of the Public. I am sure that in this country Andreyev’s play would be a more “paying proposition” for the producer than even “Everywoman.” The plaintive philosophy of Job clothed in modern phraseology; Maeterlinckian Fates dancing in a saloon around the drunken Man; symbolization of Destiny and squeals of the new-born Man; quasi-primitiveness turned into wood-cut allegory and melodramatic effects (of course, there occur several deaths: there is not a single play by Andreyev not spiced with two or three natural or unnatural deaths),—is it any wonder that Life of Man vied in popularity with its contemporary, The Merry Widow?
No, messrs. stage-managers and publishers, we reject your popular Andreyev.
Alexander S. Kaun.
Horace Traubel’s Whitman
With Walt Whitman in Camden, by Horace Traubel. [Mitchell Kennerley, New York.]
The wheat that eager work extricates from huge masses of chaff is worth what it costs. Leaves of Grass does not contain all the solid nutrition that stands for Whitman’s durable contribution to the literary food supply of America: he added to it substantially by talking to his friend, Horace Traubel, during the poet’s residence at Camden, N. J., from 1888 to the end of his life in 1892, and that comrade, who jotted down every word, has scattered the resultant wheat through its own chaff. Three of the eight volumes through which the mixture is to run have been published.
It is inevitable that inconsequential stuff—sheer nonsense in instances—should find its way into this morbidly complete story of the harvest years of Whitman’s life; but it is surprising how much personality and interpretative value lie hidden in some of his most commonplace utterances. A tremendous personality descends to occasional banality because of the inadequacy and commonness of words. It is too much to expect Whitman even to revitalize the vocabulary of a democracy. But great as he was as a cosmic voice, Whitman exhibited and confessed kinship with common clay. In fact, Leaves of Grass could never have grown out of an artificial soil, inoculated with classic cultures; it sprang as the first vegetation upon the surface of a wild, primal clay. Whitman was first of all a big, magnificent animal-man; he was secondarily a powerful poetic instrumentality, giving sound and articulation to the wee sma’ voices exhaled by the earth. That is why the essence of his message was an appeal and a challenge to and an expression of democracy. (Of course, I do not mean the institutionalized democracy of politicians, for no Jeffersonian goes to Whitman for solace when his faith is wobbling; I mean the bio-economic democracy that some of us believe in as a part of natural law.)