|
Arnold Bennett - Your United States
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
|
