Your United States by Arnold Bennett (top books to read .txt) 📕

to see and hear what passes on the stage. This happy American discovery has not yet announced itself in Europe, where in almost every theater seats are impudently sold, and idiotically bought, from which it is impossible to see and hear what passes on the stage. (A remarkable continent, Europe!) Apart from this most important point, American theaters are not, either without or within, very attractive. The auditoriums, to a European, have a somewhat dingy air. Which air is no doubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in favor of evening dress (never again shall I gird against the rule in Europe!), but it is due also to the oddly inefficient illumination during the entr'actes, and to the unsatisfactory schemes of decoration.

The interior of a theater ought to be magnificent, suggesting pleasure, luxury, and richness; it ought to create an illusion of rather riotous grandeur. The rare architects who have understood this seem to have lost their heads about it, with such wild and capricious results as the new opera-house in Philadelphia. I could not restrain my surprise that the inhabitants of the Quaker City had not arisen with pickaxes and razed this architectural extravaganza to the ground. But Philadelphia is a city startlingly unlike its European reputation. Throughout my too-brief sojourn in it I did not cease to marvel at its liveliness. I heard more picturesque and pyrotechnic wit at one luncheon in Philadelphia than at any two repasts outside it. The spacious gaiety and lavishness of its marts enchanted me. It must have a pretty weakness for the most costly old books and manuscripts. I never was nearer breaking the Sixth Commandment than in one of its homes, where the Countess of Pembroke's own copy of Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_--a unique and utterly un-Quakerish treasure--was laid trustfully in my hands by the regretted and charming Harry Widener.

To return. The Metropolitan Opera-House in New York is a much more satisfactory example of a theatrical interior. Indeed, it is very fine, especially when strung from end to end of its first tier with pearls, as I saw it. Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor. And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses did not!

Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera season in an American city is just as humiliating as it is in the other Anglo-Saxon country. It was disconcerting to see Latin or German opera given exactly--with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists and conductors, same conventions, same tricks--in New York or Philadelphia as in Europe. And though the wealthy audiences behaved better than wealthy audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes are less like inclosed pews than in London), it was mortifying to detect the secret disdain for art which was expressed in the listless late arrivings and the relieved early departures. The which disdain for art was, however, I am content to think, as naught in comparison with the withering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes revealed, by those Latin and German artists for Anglo-Saxon Philistinism. I seem to be able to read the sarcastic souls of these accomplished and sensitive aliens, when they assure newspaper reporters that New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and London are really musical. The sole test of a musical public is that it should be capable of self-support--I mean that it should produce a school of creative and executive artists of its own, whom it likes well enough to idolize and to enrich, and whom the rest of the world will respect. This is a test which can be safely applied to Germany, Russia, Italy, and France. And in certain other arts it is a test which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom--but not in music. In America and England music is still mainly a sportive habit.

When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New York, my mind at once turns, in contrast, to the natural raciness of such modest creations as those offered by Mr. George Cohan at his theater on Broadway. Here, in an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of a public demand producing the desired artist on the spot. Here is something really and honestly and respectably American. And why it should be derided by even the most lofty pillars of American taste, I cannot imagine. (Or rather, I can imagine quite well.) For myself, I spent a very agreeable evening in witnessing "The Little Millionaire." I was perfectly conscious of the blatancy of the methods that achieved it. I saw in it no mark of genius. But I did see in it a very various talent and an all-round efficiency; and, beneath the blatancy, an admirable direct simplicity and winning unpretentiousness. I liked the ingenuity of the device by which, in the words of the programme, the action of Act II was "not interrupted by musical numbers." The dramatic construction of this act was so consistently clever and right and effective that more ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Another point--though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgar otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacity and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful musical comedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value and interest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that I was really in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or London.

Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be able to generalize even for my own private satisfaction. I observed, and expected to observe, that the most reactionary quarters were the most respected. It is the same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered that two real clocks in one real room never strike simultaneously, put two real clocks on the stage, and made one strike after the other; or when a manager mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, a life-sized telephone-exchange on the stage--then was I bound to hear of "artistic realism" and "a fine production"! But such feats of truthfulness do not consort well with chocolate sentimentalities and wilful falsities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt whether I was not in London.

The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile and exasperating as the commercial English and French varieties of the problem-play, though they had a trifling advantage over the English in that their most sentimental passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously insincere felicity of their conclusions was left to the imagination instead of being acted ruthlessly out on the boards. The themes of these plays showed the usual obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt to demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so very hard after all. They threw, all unconsciously, strange side-lights on the American man's private estimate of the American woman, and the incidence of the applause was extremely instructive.

The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and Paid For," by George Broadhurst, was not a problem-play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also a purveyor of problem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale about the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl. The first act was maladroit, but the others made me think that "Bought and Paid For" was one of the best popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism at the very crisis at which experience had taught one to expect a crass sentimentality. The fairy-tale was well told, with some excellent characterization, and very well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering of the incompetent clerk was a masterly and unforgettable piece of comedy. I enjoyed "Bought and Paid For," and it is on the faith of such plays, imperfect and timid as they are, that I establish my prophecy of a more glorious hereafter for the American drama.


VII


EDUCATION AND ART

I had my first glimpses of education in America from the purser of an illustrious liner, who affirmed the existence of a dog--in fact, his own dog--so highly educated that he habitually followed and understood human conversations, and that in order to keep secrets from the animal it was necessary to spell out the keyword of a sentence instead of pronouncing it. After this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American infant who, when her parents discomfited her just curiosity by the same mean adult dodge of spelling words, walked angrily out of the room with the protest: "There's too blank much education in this house for me!" Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set herself to learn to spell; whereupon her parents descended to even worse depths of baseness, and in her presence would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merely inquired, with grimness: "What's the good of being educated, anyway? First you spell words, and when I can spell then you go and whisper!" And received no adequate answer, naturally.

This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at frequent intervals throughout my stay in America, was a mirror in which I saw the whole American race of children--their independence, their self-confidence, their adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What _is_ father?" she asked one day. Now her father happened to be one of the foremost humorists in the United States; she was baldly informed that he was a humorist. "What _is_ a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learned that a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make people laugh. "Well," she said, "I don't honestly think he's very funny at home." It was naught to her that humorists are not paid to be funny at home, and that in truth they never under any circumstances are very funny at home. She just hurled her father from his niche--and then went forth and boasted of him as a unique peculiarity in fathers, as an unrivaled ornament of her career on earth; for no other child in the vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her gestures and accent typified for me the general attitude of youngest America, in process of education, toward the older generation: an astonishing, amusing, exquisite, incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust, and rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of most countries display a similar phenomenon, but in America the phenomenon is more acute and disconcerting than elsewhere.

One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking down the main road of a residential suburb, and observing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons, and the ice-wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the gastric experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-style dwellings, and the "tinder" boarding-houses, and the towering boot-shine stands, and the roast-chestnut emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and beautiful river--I was observing all this when a number of young men and maids came out of a high-school and unconsciously assumed possession of the street. It was a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful sight. They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly; so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so convinced (without any conceit) that their importance transcended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was thrilled thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And they never suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It was the sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and across the badly laid tram-lines! I had never seen anything like it. I immediately desired to visit schools. Profoundly ignorant of