THE DIAL A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information. THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by draft, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to No. 298. THE DIAL, 315 Wabash Ave., Chicago. THE DRAMA AS ART. Every now and then, the consciousness of that section of the public which is provided with such uncomfortable things as ideals becomes stirred to the pitch of indignation in contemplation of the degradation to which some form of artistic endeavor is subjected by the hard conditions that a commercial age ever seeks to impose, and NOVEMBER 16, 1898. Vol. XXV. usually succeeds in imposing, upon the produc tion of the art in question. At one time it is literature, at another music, at still another painting that comes up for discussion; just now, thanks to the stimulus of a lecture by Mr. Israel Zangwill, it is dramatic art upon which the fierce light of criticism beats. That the art of the playwright will be bettered by this lightor, to vary the metaphor, by the destructive distillation of the accompanying heat—is more than doubtful; but it is well that some one should from time to time call public attention sharply to the low estate into which the stage has fallen, for if the ideal find no spokesman when hardest pressed, its condition is indeed hopeless. Mr. Zangwill, who has just thrown himself bravely into the breach, deserves warm gratitude for what he has been saying, and we trust will keep on saying, for the substance of his contention is of demonstrable nature, and the eternal years of God belong to the truths that are being given so pointed an expression. Like all speakers of the unvarnished truth, Mr. Zangwill finds that his message is anything but acceptable in many quarters. To say nothing of the wounded susceptibilities of dramatic managers, and of the men who fabricate the kind of play that the managers want, the journeymen who write "dramatic criticism" for the newspaper press are quite comically outraged by his outspoken remarks. Many of them have been saying much the same thing, in a more guarded way, all along; but they profess themselves outraged by the antics of this bull in the china-shop of modern vaudeville, and cheap farce, and tawdry melodrama. They would roar you as gently as any sucking-dove, but they would not for the world speak the plain truth in plain words; and as for the scintillating words and keen thrusts that flash from Mr. Zangwill's armory, they are wholly incapable of forging and wielding the needed weapons. Indeed, the lot of these gentlemen who write about the nightly happenings of the stage is no pleasant one. They have to deaden whatever artistic conscience they may possess, to invent euphemistic phrases for the characterization of bad plays, to pretend that the contemporary English stage is interesting when they know in their heart of hearts that it is not, and, above all, to simulate a virtuous and fiery indignation when some dramatist of genius traverses the petty conventions of an artificial seem liness and probes human life to its depths. The treatment accorded to Dr. Ibsen during the past ten years by nearly all newspaper critics stands in everlasting and shameful evidence of their shallow incompetence as a tribe. we recall the noble uses to which the stage has been put in other times and lands, when we reflect upon the possibilities, for instruction and edification, of the play which is conceived as something finer than a means of amusement, we cannot but view with contempt the English play which we get from the theatrical syndicate and the "bad shopkeepers" of Mr. Zangwill's invective. And when we realize that the drama is still treated as a fine art in France and Germany, in Spain and Italy, in Russia and Scandinavia, while in the English-speaking countries alone it has fallen to a level which makes meaningless any mention of art in its discussion, we may well bow our heads with shame. This is a general truth of which there is no effective denying, for the occasional manager of high ideals and the occasional play of literary quality serve only to emphasize the pass to which the majority of plays and managers have come. It is no more than the simple truth to say that our audiences do not want ideas in their plays; they want costumes, and tricks of stage-carpentry, and farcical situations; they are hugely delighted by a catchy song or an utterly irrelevant dance; they will tolerate sentiment if not too delicate, and even passion if its origin be not too deep within the soul; but ideas they will not have on any terms. We e are glad, then, that Mr. Zangwill has stirred the waters in which these criticasters disport themselves, and has called widespread public attention to a few home truths concerning plays and playgoers. He has said nothing new about the subject - there is nothing new to say but he has placed a pretty wit at the service of a few of the old ideas, and some of his observations are pointed enough to pierce the utmost thickness of the Philistine hide. There is penetrative energy in such phrases as the following: "The modern receipt for a successful play is a paying compound of snivel, drivel, Is our popular artistic standard lower in and devil." "The old actors are dead and matters pertaining to the stage than it is in buried, but the plays are dead and printed. You matters that concern the other forms of art can buy them at the price of eggs, twenty-five endeavor? Mr. Zangwill thinks that it is; but cents a dozen, and they are mostly bad." "The we are not so sure. It is popular taste in “litcritic no more represents the simple and occa- erature that makes possible the existence of the sional playgoer than a congressman represents class of newspapers that so disgrace American the baby he kisses." The taste of these sayings civilization. Surely the stage, at its basest, is dubious, but an exhibition of bad taste is no can do no worse than that. If we seem to set new thing to Mr. Zangwill's readers. Free up a higher standard for books than we do for from this reproach are such acute sayings as plays, it must be remembered that the bad play these: "Irving's respect for Tennyson is unique forces itself more obtrusively upon public attenin the history of the stage- and of Irving.' tion than the bad book. People view the for"Ibsen's ink often runs in the veins of his char- mer in public, as it were, and it is discussed in acters." "The French stage has never lost its the public press; whereas the latter is read in literary tradition. We have legitimatized its We have legitimatized its private, and the critic usually ignores it altochildren, we have turned its intrigues into flir-gether. Beneath the lowest stratum of books tations; but such virtue has its own reward." The lecture from which these excerpts are made is a sort of Gatling gun of epigrams, and its deadly fire is sustained for more than an hour with but brief pretermissions. The essential contention of this censor of a degraded art is that our playmongers are apt to forget that it is a form of art with which they are concerned. When we think what the drama has been as a factor in civilization, when that are thought deserving of mention by newspaper reviewers, there is a still lower stratum that makes up the chief reading of countless thousands of people, as far as they read books at all. But the theatres that provide the corresponding forms of cheap sentiment and vulgarity are conspicuous in the public eye, and have their place in the daily or weekly theatrical summaries. We doubt, then, very much if the taste of the real public be any better in its read ing than in its acting. When we consider music, painting, and sculpture, much the same principles hold true. As in literature, so in the case of these arts, we can never learn what the masses really like, because we cannot readily catch. them (as we can at a theatre) in the act of what stands to them for æsthetic contemplation. But from the popularity of certain forms of music, and of certain forms of the graphic arts, forms in which imbecility and vulgarity seek to outrival each other-we may at least shrewdly surmise that the taste of the dear public is here, as with books and plays, in almost equally evil case. Yet when all is said, one important consideration remains. In literature, the finest forms of art are accessible to everybody. This statement is also measurably true of music, and painting, and sculpture. One can to a considerable extent come to understand the ideals of these arts by the study of photographs and scores. At all events, the large cities afford actual examples of the highest achievements of these arts. But even the large cities rarely, if ever, afford to the spectator examples of what the art dramatic at its highest can do. They may show us marvellous stage-effects, but they do not show us sincerity of purpose and unity of artistic endeavor. In this respect, it is true that in England and America the drama stands upon a lower level than the other arts. We can all read the greatest literature at home; we can often hear the greatest music perfectly performed; we can view some of the greatest works of painting and sculpture in the originals and all of them in trustworthy reproduction; but we cannot witness such productions of the great plays as are to be witnessed in the theatres of the European Continent. Our productions may cost a great deal more, and be more dazzling to most of the senses, but they do not make art their foremost consideration, and they justify the reproach that in our time has fallen upon the English-speaking stage. practicality on our national character, have we gone the whole Baconian way. Recent events are like to confirm us in the reasonableness of our ideals and methods. A South American traveller reports asking the Padre of a Jesuist Mission what it was he taught the Indians whom he caught young and innoculated with Spanish civilization. Why," he said, "we teach them poetry and theology." Does not the difference between the Latin races and ours speak in that statement? But let us not be too proud. Poetry and theology are no bad aids to happiness in this life and security in the next. The charm of life is something; the two immortalities of art and the soul are more. There have been civilizations which have risen and spread and dominated the world, and then vanished and left nothing behind in the mind of man but a nightmare and a headache. Despite our material prosperity, I believe there would be a gain in the higher and intenser joys of living were some philosopher to look about him and free us a direction leading away from the long-travelled Baconian road. We have ceased to live in the imagination. Literature is degraded to about the position of the lapdog of an idle woman. Restore us our faiths and our fancies, O philosopher, and you may take away some of our comforts and conveniences. Perhaps the witch's broomstick was a better vehicle than the bicycle. But is it possible to establish a new direction? Are we not in the iron grip of a movement which must go on until every atom of imagination, every spark of superiority, is extinguished? The theories of spontaneous generation and development have disposed of First Causes and Efficient Causes, and the rest. Man is only a part of the machine of the world, and can no longer, as of old, front the huge beast and sport with him and turn him about. We are no longer images of Our Maker, but a conglomeration of cells and unconscious cerebration. We have lost initiative. Bacon We can no longer originate or control. expressly claimed for his philosophy that it did away with the necessity for superior talents that it tended to make all men equal. And genius itself is accepting this view to-day. Tolstoi in his " War and Peace" has a long polemic against the delusions of superiority and direction. Great warriors and generals, he explains, have nothing to do with gaining battles: "the man behind the gun" does it all. An event like the French Revolution, he says, surges up from below, to label it with the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, is absurd. He does not go so far as to claim that without Christ Christianity could have existed, or Mohammedism without Mohammed, or that the radiant area of peopled creation which we know as the Shakespearean world could have come into being wanting Shakespeare, - but the deductions are evident. Positively, it is a relief to turn from the worship of unguided force from the view of man as a product of climates, foods, inherited nerve-suggestion, and what not, to Nietszche's conception of the Over -- Man, who at least stands on his own legs and plays ducks and drakes with the universe. Waiting the philosopher to arise who is capable of changing our course, I would offer a few suggestions which are particularly for the interests of literature. It is wrong to suppose that literature in its normal state deals with or imitates all of life with equal pleasure. There are vast regions of human experience and exertion upon which it looks coldly. The scientific activities of man the accumulations of minute facts and the uses to which they are turned are indifferent if not repugnant to it. Keats was perfectly right in drinking to the confusion of Newton, who destroyed the rainbow. The vast daily commonplaces of life have hardly more place in real literature. They are not beautiful enough, or significant enough, or profound enough, for lasting record. Yet it is precisely in these fields that the tendency of modern thought has driven literature to reap harvests. its It is worth while to analyze a little the ordinary and the commonplace, to see why they fail to afford materials for great art. A human being is a human being, and per se one ought to be as interesting as another. But they are not. Circumstances alter cases. Père Goriot suffers perhaps as intensely as King Lear, but he does not affect us as much or as permanently. In the first place, Balzac could not deal with him beautifully. To put into his mouth the magnificent language of King Lear would have been inappropriate even had it been at Balzac's command, and cloth of gold is more valuable than homespun. In the second place, to have given Père Goriot the far-reaching and elemental thought of King Lear would have been equally absurd. The conditions of his life could not allow or evoke it. Yet great thought is a necessary requisite of great art. And, lastly, Père Goriot is simply an unfortunate old man, like any other; whereas King Lear is the symbol of old age itself, the old age not only of humanity but of nature. There is a tendency among recent writers to use scientific facts and appliances as materials for literature. A certain hardness and hollowness in the results is discouraging. It is curious how little we really care for such things. A lucifer match or a telephone instrument is an article of comfort and convenience. We use the one or the other without emotion or gratitude. The slightest fact of experience which touches our souls the sight of a sunset, the scent of a flower, the sound of a woman's voice is worth a thousand times more for delight and for literature than all the scientific facts and generali zations in existence. The sciences are the helots of civilization the hewers of wood and drawers of water. We accept their services, but dismiss them from our company when we are bent on intellectual or social enjoyment. They have always resented this exclusion, and of late, by dint of decrying the nobler and more delicate susceptibilities of human nature, they have crushed their way into recognition. But the moment man recovers the knowledge of himself as a being whose best prerogatives are to think and feel, the doom of their equality is sealed. If literature can get little aid from science or the commonplace, it may be urged that history can supply all the materials it needs, and of the noblest and costliest kind. History is the school-girl's idea of serious literature. She would be shocked if told that she must go to poems and plays for profundity. But Aristotle said that history was less philosophical than poetry. Diderot said that history was a bad novel. Arnold said that history presented foam-bells of truth on a Mississippi of falsehood. History, in fact, lacks the metaphysic basis of great art. It relates men only to each other, seldom to their families, and never to Nature or God. It is always the same kaleidoscope, with the same bits of colored glass, in the same hard brilliancy and unmeaning complication. A great writer, a Shakespeare or a Scott, may humanize characters out of history, but as a rule they are only half successes, inferior to figures the same writers caught from common legend or projected from their own souls. Wagner hesitated in choosing for the trial of his greatest powers between the historical Barbarossa and the legendary Siegfried, and he finally rejected the first because he felt that the history had not the truth or significance of the myth. It is, indeed, in the direction of the myth that we must turn for the first hope of great literature. The myth-making instinct is its life-blood. To allegorize the facts of nature or humanity, to fasten upon and exalt certain elemental traits and types, is the primal instinct. The conscience, the aspirations, the very essence of races, speak in their myths. Yet myths are always an individual product. People never assembled in convention to make one, as we do to nominate a President. Some sensitive poet soul first embodied in words an appearance of nature or a human experience. Another added to this, another interpreted it, another satirized it, until it became a possession of the tribe and the world. In this view the process is always going on. The great figures of history, as they are accepted by mankind, are in the main myths. The mere trivial truths of biogra phy are overridden by the sum of impression. Here in America we are unfortunate in not having a background deep enough for these ghosts and guides of life to gather in any number, yet we have done what we could. I cannot recall any other instance of a superior race accepting the legends of an inferior and savage one, and making literature out of them. Yet this is what Longfellow effected with Indian mythology in Hiawatha, and Cooper with Indian legends in the Pathfinder romances. Hawthorne was driven to import into Puritan life old-world ideas, most assuredly foreign to such an environment,the search for the elixir of youth, for instance, the phantasies of ancestral curses, of a reincarnated faun, and many others. Poe's poetry and romances belong to the region of abstraction, metaphysics, rather than of myth. All these writers were conscious in their efforts after what must have seemed to their contemporaries unreality. In the critical jargon of to-day, they were not sincere. Yet they achieved great successes the greatest our literature has known. There is no reason why their successors should not follow in their footsteps. Imagination lies dormant in the mind of man, and only needs a touch to evoke it. Myths are the metaphysics of the ignorant. But metaphysics themselves the imaginations and logical deductions of abstract thought—are and always must be the mental pabulum of the educated. There lies the theatre of the world's greatest poetry. It is folly to say that the problems of thought have all been threshed out that "fate, foreknowledge, free-will absolute," the finite and infinite, birth and decay, good and evil - have all been so thoroughly debated that there is nothing more to say about them, or that Mr. Herbert Spencer's Pyrrhonistic dialectic has put them forever out of court. They are no more exhausted than the eternal "Amandus he" "Amanda she". COMMUNICATIONS. AS TO "HAD BETTER." (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) The reading of Professor Edward A. Allen's communication in THE DIAL for November 1 might prompt the query, How far is grammatical construction to be sacrificed to a popular idiom? It strikes one who reveres, without feeling himself worthy to be classed among the "purists," that while there are combinations preferable to "would better" the idiomatic "had better" is not among them. Let us make a few experiments with Professor Allen's first quoted sentence as a basis. By changing the auxiliary we have: 1. " You can better see about it yourself." 2. "You might better see about it yourself." 3. "You had better see about it yourself." Now suppose we remove the adverb "better" (which threatens to befog the view of everybody but the "purists") to a place almost equally advantageous for it, near the end of the sentence, and note the result: 1. "You can see about it better yourself." 2. "You might see about it better yourself." 3. "You had see about it better yourself." Which of these three is it that "defies all logical analysis"? If the last one is anything but insipid English," if it is not nearer an "idiotism" than an idiom, if nobody except a "purist" would dream of 66 which is the staple of fiction. Man must investigate objecting to it, then may Heaven and the colleges send us more "purists " before our language becomes entirely corrupted! FRANK M. BICKNELL. the dark foundations of his estate. The main tendency of modern literature is akin to the impressionistic fallacy in painting, which strives to solve the problems of light, and forgets that nearly all significance comes through shadow. To go into a gallery of impressionistic pictures is like entering a spring opening of a millinery establishment. Everything is so gay, riant, and trivial. Put a Rembrandt or a Corot or a Millet among such pictures, and the grave deep note makes the triviality still more apparent. In the same way, bring the figures of an Elizabethan tragedy into a crowd of characters from modern novels, and the latter will seem like chattering monkeys in a cage. Patriotism and Religion are matters of too mighty import to be made the tails of a literary kite. They are, indeed, too dominating and absorbing in their nature to have any direct or immediate effect on literature. They work for it, as they spiritualize man break up his selfishness and sordidness, and give play to the exalted enthusiasms of the soul. A wave of patriotism seems spreading over the world, and perhaps the opening century will see a reawakening of the religious instinct. I have said enough to indicate the direction I believe literature should take. Of course, art of any kind can never give up its imitation of life, its reproduction of reality. Myths and abstractions must be embodied in human form, must be translated into terms of human experience, before they can interest humanity. The dark monotony of thought must be infused with emotion, colored with imagery. But, for my part, I cannot conceive of anything more useless than a literature which reproduces life without a background of thought and imagination. CHARLES LEONARD MOORE. Malden, Mass., Nov. 5, 1898. THE WHITE MAN AND THE TROPICS. Your brief notice of Mr. Benjamin Kidd's remarkable little book on "The Control of the Tropics" (THE DIAL, Nov. 1) accurately states that somewhat dogmatic writ er's main conclusion, but fails to point out a serious flaw in his argument. I allude to the sweeping assumption that the white races cannot permanently and successfully colonize the tropics. Mr. Kidd, soaring on the wings of theory, picturesquely says: "In the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water"! It is pretty evident that Mr. Kidd has never been south of the Tropic of Cancer. To his imagination Mandeville) a tropical country apparently presents itself (fed, one might suppose, by the reports of Sir John as an Inferno, the native races of which are a sort of human salamanders born to an environment in which the white man is either bound to be promptly grilled to death, or else to gradually perish, qua white man, through a process of mental and physical enfeeblement. The fact is, Mr. Kidd is so bent on working out his imperialistic thesis that he exaggerates, on the one hand, the climatic dangers and discomforts that beset the white settler in the tropics, and underrates, on the other hand, the degree to which those dangers and discomforts can be counteracted by modern hygienic science. Were tropical heat the real enemy, the case of the colonist might be considered hopeless. But the real enemy is the microbe. It has been pretty conclusively shown, as is stated in "The British Medical Journal," that "disease, deterioration, and deaths in the tropics are due not so much to the influence of climate as to pathogenic germs, which have their limited and peculiar geographical areas, and differ greatly in the various tropical regions." The inference is plain. As a matter of fact, owing to scientific sanitation, the death-rate of English troops in India, which used to be about 125 per thousand, is now as low as 12 per thou |