Kitabı oku: «Seeing Things at Night», sayfa 12
The Cosmic "Kid"
Every little while some critic or other begins to dance about with all the excitement of a lonely watcher on a peak in Darien and to shout, as he dances, that Charlie Chaplin is a great actor. The grass on that peak is now crushed under foot. Harvey O'Higgins has danced there and Mrs. Fiske and many another, but still the critics rush in. Of course, a critic is almost invariably gifted with the ability not to see or hear what any other commentator but himself writes about anything, but there is more than this to account for the fact that so many persons undertake to discover Chaplin. As in the case of all great artists, he is able to convey the impression, always, of doing a thing not only for the first time but of giving a special and private performance for each sensitive soul in the audience. It is possible to sit in the middle of a large and tumultuous crowd and still feel that Charlie is doing special little things for your own benefit which nobody else in the house can understand or enjoy.
Personally we never see him in a new picture without suddenly being struck with the thought, "How long has this been going on?" Each time we leave the theater we expect to see people dancing in the streets because of Chaplin and to meet delegations with olive wreaths hurrying toward Los Angeles. We don't. Unfortunately Americans have a perfect passion for flying into a great state of calm about things and, for all the organized cheering from the top of the peak in Darien, we take Chaplin much too calmly at all moments except when we are watching him. Phrases which are his by every right have been wasted on lesser people. Walter Pater, for instance, lived before his time and was obliged to spend that fine observation, "Here is the head upon which all the ends of the earth have come and the eyelids are a little weary" upon the Mona Lisa.
The same ends of the same earth have come upon the head of Charlie Chaplin. Still Mr. Pater, if he had lived, would have been obliged to amend his observation a little. The eyelids are not weary. Unlike the Mona Lisa, Chaplin is able to shake his head every now and then and break free from his burden. In these great moments he seems to stand clear of all things and to be alone in space with nothing but sky about him. To be sure the earth crashes down on him again, but he bears it without blinking. It is only his shoulders which sag a little.
Charlie seems to us to fulfil the demand made of the creative artist that he shall be both an individual and a symbol at the same time. He presents a definite personality and yet he is also Man who grins and whistles as he clings to his spinning earth because he is afraid to go home in the dark. To be much more explicit, there is one particular scene in The Kid in which Chaplin having recently picked up a stray baby finds the greatest difficulty in getting rid of it. Balked at every turn, he sits down wearily upon a curbstone and suddenly notices that just in front of him there is an open manhole. First he peers down; then he looks at the child. He hesitates and turns a project over in his mind and reluctantly decides that it won't do. Every father in the world has sat at some time or other by that manhole. Moreover, in the half suggested shake of his head Chaplin touches the paternal feeling more closely than any play ever written around a third act in a nursery on Christmas Eve. We can all watch him and choke down half a sob at the thought that after all the Life Force is supreme and you can't throw 'em down the manholes.
Many a good performance on the stage is purely accidental. Actors are praised for some trick of gesture or a particular note in the voice of which they are quite unconscious. We raved once over the remarkable fidelity of accent in an actress cast to play the rôle of a shop girl in a certain melodrama and it was not until we saw her the next season, when she was cast as a duchess, that we realized that there was no art about it. Chaplin does not play by ear. His method is definite, and it could not seem so easy if it were not carefully calculated. He does more with a gesture than almost anybody else can do by falling downstairs. He can turn from one mood to another with all the agility of a polo pony. And in addition to being one of the greatest artists of our day he is more fun than all the rest put together.
There must be a specially warm corner in Hell reserved for those parents who won't let their children see Charlie Chaplin on the ground that he is too vulgar. Of course, he is vulgar. Everybody who amounts to anything has to touch earth now and again to be revitalized. Chaplin has the right attitude toward vulgarity. He can take it or let it alone. Children who don't see Charlie Chaplin have, of course, been robbed of much of their childhood. However, they can make it up in later years when the old Chaplin films will be on view in the museums and carefully studied under the direction of learned professors in university extension courses.
A Jung Man's Fancy
Pollyanna died and, of course, she was glad and went to Heaven. It is just as well. The strain had become a little wearing. We had Liberty Loan orators, too, and Four-Minute men and living in America came to be something like being a permanent member of a cheering section. All that is gone now. Pointing with pride has become rude. The interpretation of life has been taken over by those who view with alarm. Pick up any new novel at random and the chances are that it will begin about as follows:
"Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back of the town – called in derision by rivermen 'Mudcat Landing' – was almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long, gaunt men, who seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived."
On page four the reader will find that young Hugh has been apprenticed to work on the sewers and after that, as the writer warms to his task, things begin to grow less cheerful. This particular exhibit happens to be taken from Sherwood Anderson's Poor White, but if we go north to Gopher Prairie, celebrated by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street, we shall find: "A fly-buzzing saloon with a brilliant gold and enamel whisky sign across the front. Other saloons down the block. From them a stink of stale beer, and thick voices bellowing pidgin German or trolling out dirty songs – vice gone feeble and unenterprising and dull – the delicacy of a mining camp minus its vigor. In front of the saloons, farm wives sitting on the seats of wagons, waiting for their husbands to become drunk and ready to start home."
Wander as you will through the novels of the year, I assure you that things will be found to be about the same. Of course, it is possible now and again to get away from the stale beer, but once a story enters prohibition time the study of starved souls and complexes begins. There are also books in which there isn't any mud, but these pay particular attention to the stifling dust.
It must be that all this sort of life has been going on for some time, but naturally during the war when the Hun was at the gate it would hardly have been patriotic to talk about it. Now that it's all among friends we can talk about our morals and habits and they seem to range from none to appalling. I can't testify completely to the state of affairs reported upon by the novelists, because I have spent a good deal of time recently in the theater and it is only fair to say that there, at any rate, peach jam and country air still combine to reform city dwellers, and people get married and live happily ever after, and some of them dance and sing and make jokes, and, of course, sunlight and moonlight and pink dresses and green ones and gold and silver ones, too, abound. My aunt says that this is just as it should be. "There's so much unhappiness in the world," she says, "that why should we pay money to see shows and read books that help to remind us about it. The man worth while," she says, "is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong."
Practically all the shows in town seem to have been written to please my aunt, but I don't agree with her at all. As a matter of fact, she lives in Pelham and has never heard of Freud or Jung. I tried to convince her once that practically all of what we call the civilized world is inhibited, and she interrupted to say that the last Saturday night lecturer told them the same thing about Mars. Perhaps it will be just as well to leave my aunt out of the story at this point and go on to explain why the modern novel is more stimulating and encouraging to the ego than the modern play.
First of all, it is necessary to understand that a novel or a play or any form of art is what we call an escape. To be sure, a good many plays of the year are not calculated to give anybody much of a start on the bloodhounds, but you understand what I mean. Take, for instance, the most humdrum person of your acquaintance and you will probably find that he is an inveterate patron of the moving pictures. Lacking romance in real life he gets it from watching Mary Pickford in the moonlight and seeing Douglas Fairbanks jump over gates. He himself will never be in the moonlight to any serious extent and he will jump no gates. The moving pictures will have amply satisfied his romantic cravings.
The man in the theater or the man who reads a book identifies himself with one of the characters, hero or villain as the case may be, and while the spell is on he lives the life of the fictional character. Next morning he can punch the time clock with no regrets. An interesting thesis might be written on the question of just what bearing the eyebrows of Wallace Reid have upon the falling marriage rate in the United States, but that would require a great many statistics and a knowledge of cube root.
Assuming then that art, – and for the purposes of this argument moving pictures and crook plays will be included under that heading, – takes the place of life for a great many people, what do we find about the pernicious effect of happy novels and plays upon the community in general? Simply that the man who is addicted to seeing plays and reading books in which everybody performs prodigies of virtue is not even going to the trouble of doing so much as one good deed a day on his own account.
The man who went with me to see Daddies a couple of seasons ago glowed with as complete a spirit of self-sacrifice as I have ever seen during all three acts of the play. He projected himself into the story and felt that he was actually patting little children on the head and adopting orphans and surprising them with Christmas gifts. On the way uptown he let me pay the fares and buy the newspapers as well. All his kindly impulses had been satisfied by seeing the play. He was very cross and gloomy for the rest of the week.
Being rather more regular in theatergoing than my friend, I failed to make any complete identification with anybody on the stage, but I was also somewhat depressed. The saintly old lady in the play had spoken of "the tinkling laughter of tiny tots" and it made me reflect on the imperfections of life. It did not seem to me at the time as if any of the children who live in the flat next door ever really tinkle. A week later I saw Hamlet and the effect was diametrically opposite. Everything in the play tended to make life seem more cheerful. He was too, too solid in flesh, also, and in many other respects he seemed ever so much worse off than I was. After watching the rotten state of affairs in Denmark, Ninety-fifth Street didn't seem half bad. And, goody, goody! next week an Ibsen season begins!
It is no accident that the Scandinavian drama is generally gloomy. Ibsen understood the psychology of his countrymen. He lived in a land of long cold winters and poor steam heat. If he had written joyfully and lightheartedly, thousands, well say hundreds, of Norwegians would have gone home to die or to wish to die. Instead he gave them folk like Oswald, and all the Norwegian playgoers could go skipping out into the moonlight with their teeth chattering from laughter as much as from cold. After seeing Ghosts there is no place like home. I wish some of the Broadway dramatists were as shrewd as Ibsen. Then we might have plays in which nobody could raise the mortgage and the rent crisis in our own lives would seem less acute.
If the heroine were turned out into a driving snowstorm and stayed there, I might appreciate our janitor. And if the wild young men and the women who pay and pay and pay would only quit reforming in the third act and climbing back to respectability out of the depths of degradation, I know I could derive no little satisfaction from the knowledge that the elevator in our building runs until twelve o'clock on Saturday nights.
Deburau
Theatergoers who have lived through two or more generations invariably complain that the stage isn't what it used to be. Mostly they mourn for a school of drama in which emotion flowered more luxuriantly than in the usual run of plays to-day about life in country stores and city flats. The one thought in which these playgoers of another day take comfort is that even if we had such drama now there would be no one who could act it. But Deburau is such a play, and Lionel Atwill must be some such one as those who figure in the speeches of our older friends when they say: "Ah, but then you never saw – ". Sacha Guitry, who wrote Deburau, is alive; yes, indeed, even more than that, for he lives in Paris, and Lionel Atwill is a young actor whose greatest previous success in New York was achieved in the realistic drama of Ibsen. Now, it is possible for us to turn upon the elders and to say to them: "It is not for want of ability that this age of ours doesn't do your old-style plays. We could if we would. Go and see Deburau and Lionel Atwill."
Of course, even in this verse play of the tragic life of a French actor of the early nineteenth century there are modern touches. For all the fact that Atwill is able to rise now and again to a carefully contrived situation and to develop it into a magnificent moment of ringing voice and sweeping gesture, he is also able to do the much greater and more exciting thing of making Deburau seem at times a man and not a great character in a play. He is able to make Deburau, actor, dead man, Frenchman, seem the common fellow of us all. And, still more wonderful, Lionel Atwill succeeds in doing this even in scenes during which the author is pitching rimed couplets around his neck as if he were no man at all, but nothing more than one of the posts in a game of quoits. I find it difficult to believe that anybody's heart is breaking when he expresses his emotion in carefully carpentered rhyme:
"Trained in art from my cradle," did you say?
Well, I hadn't a cradle. But, anyway,
If you bid me recall those things, here goes —
Though I've tried hard enough to forget them, God knows.
When people on the stage begin to speak in this fashion the persuasive air of reality is seldom present. It is with Atwill. He is careful not to accentuate the beat. Sometimes I am almost persuaded during his performance that it isn't poetry at all. When I watch him, verse is forgotten, but I have only to close my eyes to hear the deep and steady rumble of the beat which thumps beneath the play. Atwill is a man standing on top of a volcano. So great is his unconcern that you may accept it as extinct, but sooner or later you will know better, for by and by, with a terrifying roar, off goes the head of the mountain in an eruption of rhyme.
Atwill is not the only modern note in an old-fashioned play by a young man of to-day. Our forefathers may be speaking the truth when they tell us that in their day all the actors were nine or ten feet tall and spoke in voices slightly suggestive of Caruso at his best, but our forefathers never saw such a production as David Belasco has given to Deburau. No one knew in those days of the wonders which could be achieved with light. Nobody, then, could have shown us in the twinkling of an eye the front of Deburau's tiny theater, then the interior of the theater itself, and finally, with only a passing moment of darkness, carry the stage of the theater within a theater forward and set it down in front of the audience, greatly grown by its journey.
In Sacha Guitry's play about Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard Deburau we see this famous clown and pantomimist, who brought all Paris to his tiny theater some hundred years ago, in the midst of a performance. We hear the applause of his audience and then after a bit we see the man himself rid of his Pierrot garb and his white grease paint. He is introduced to us as an exceedingly modest young genius who deplores the fact that he has become hated by his fellow players because of the applause heaped upon him by the critics. Nor is he any better pleased when fair ladies wait to see him after a performance to press their attentions upon him. For them he has invented a formula of repulse. After a moment or so he produces a miniature from his pocket and remarks: "Pretty, isn't it?" When the fair lady agrees he adds: "It's a picture of my wife. I should so like to have you meet her."
But one night Deburau meets a lady much fairer than any of the others, and this time he forgets to show her the miniature. In the second act we find that he is madly in love with her, while she, although she is touched by his devotion, has outgrown her fancy for the actor. It is Deburau who christens her "the lady with the camellias," for she is Marie Duplessis, better known to us as Camille. Returning home for the first time in a week, Deburau finds his wife has left him and, gathering up his bird, his dog, and his little son, he goes to the house of Marie, hoping there to find welcome and consolation. Instead he finds another lover, Armand Duval, who is to make Marie one of the great heroines of emotional drama.
Seven years pass before the next act begins, and now we find Deburau old, broken, and disheartened. He has left the theater and he lives tended only by his son, who has grown to be a lively youngster of seventeen. Somewhat to his chagrin, he finds that the boy is eager to become an actor, and this emotion changes to anger when he learns that his son has studied all his rôles and hopes to make a début in Paris simply as Deburau. He is not to be brushed aside in such cavalier fashion. There is only one Deburau, he declares, and there will be only one until he dies.
To the garret, then, comes Marie Duplessis, truant through all the seven years, but the joy of Deburau is short-lived. He finds that she has not come back because she loves him, but because she is sorry for him. She has come with her doctor. Still, after Marie has gone and Deburau has been left alone with the physician, he finds unexpected consolation for his weary spirit. The physician finds no physical ailment. The trouble, he declares, is a nervous one. For that he can do little. Some magic other than medicine is needed. He suggests books, painting, nature, but to each Deburau shakes a weary head. They don't interest him. The theater, the doctor continues, is perhaps the best hospital of all. There are one or two actors, he tells Deburau, who are greater than any doctors in their power to bring merriment and new life to tired men.
"Who?" asks the sick man, and the doctor tells him of Deburau and his great art. Yes, by all means Deburau is the man he should see.
No sooner has the doctor left than Deburau calls for his hat and his stick. He will no longer sit idle while inferior men play his parts. He is going back to the theater. There we find him in the last act in the middle of a performance in one of his most famous rôles, but his old grace and agility are gone. When the audience should weep it laughs and there are tears instead of smiles for his decrepit attempts at comedy. Finally, he is hissed and booed and, after he has made a dumb speech of farewell, the curtain is rung down. The manager is in a panic. Somebody else must be put forward. It is quite evident that Deburau is done. In the crisis the old actor begs a favor. His son, he tells the manager, knows all his rôles. Why not let the audience have a new Deburau, a young Deburau? Then, as the company gathers about to listen, the old man makes up the boy for his part, and as he does so he tells him in a few simple words the secrets and the fundamentals of the art of acting. Presently the drum of the barker is heard outside the theater and the audience hears him announce that Deburau the great will give way to a greater Deburau, a Deburau more agile, more comic, more tragic. Then the terrified boy is pushed out upon the stage and the play begins.
By an ingenious device of David Belasco all our attention is focused upon the old man, who is listening and watching the performance of his successor, which we see only dimly through gauze curtains, but we hear the laughter and the shouts and the cheers. The new Deburau is a success, a triumph. The noise comes more faintly to our ears and we see only the old Deburau standing listening as from the house which has just hissed him there comes a wild acclaiming shout for his successor of "Deburau! Deburau!"
The old man does not know whether he should laugh or cry, and so he cries.
