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Mike and Mike






at others to find himself at home in it. His single pictures: The Days of Real Sport and When a Feller Needs a Friend, and the now rapidly disappearing Kelly Pool which was technically a strip, are notable recreations of simple life. Few of them are actively funny; some are sentimental. The children of The Days of Real Sport have an astonishing reality and none are more real than the virtually unseen Skinnay, who is always being urged to " come over." They are a gallery of country types, some of them borrowed from literature-the Huck Finn touch is visible-but all of them freshly observed and dryly recorded. Briggs' line is distinctive; one could identify any square inch of his drawings. In Kelly Pool he worked close to Tad's Indoor Sports, and did what Tad hasn't done--created a character, the negro waiter George whom I shall be sorry to lose. George's amateur interest in pool was continually being submerged in his professional interest:: gettings tips, and his " Bad day... ba-a-ad day" when tips were low is a little classic. Deserting that scene, Briggs has made a successful comedy of domestic life in Mr and Mrs. No one has come so near to the subject-the grumbling, helpless, assertive, modest, self- satisfied, self-deprecating male, in his contacts with his sensible, occasionally irritable, wife. As often as not these episodes end in quarrels-in utter blackness with harsh bedroom voices continuing a day's exacerbations; again the reconciliations are mushy, again they

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are genuine sentiment. And around them plays the child whose one function is to say " Papa loves mamma" at the most appropriate time. It is quite an achievement, for Briggs has made the ungrateful material interesting, and I can recall not one of these strips in which he has cracked a joke. Tad here follows Briggs, respectfully. For Better or Worse is considerably more obvious, but it has Tad's special value, in sharpness of caricature. The surrounding types are brilliantly drawn; only the central characters remain stock figures. Yet the touch of romance in Tad, continually overlaid by his sense of the ridiculous, is precious; he seems aware of the faint aspirations of his characters and recognizes the r6les which they think they are playing while he mercilessly shows up their actuality. The finest of the Indoor Sports are those in which two subordinate characters riddle with sarcasm the pretentions of the others-the clerk pretending to be at ease when the boss brings his son into the office, the lady of the house talking about the new motor car, the smalltown braggart and the city swell-characters out of melodrama, some, and others so vividly taken from life that the very names Tad gives them pass into common speech. He is an inveterate creator and manipulator of slang; whatever phrase he makes or picks up has its vogue for months and his own variations are delightful. Slang is a part of their picture, and he and Walter Hoban are the only masters of it.

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Ketten's Day of Rest is another strip of this genre, interesting chiefly as a piece of draughtsmanship. He is the most economical of the comic-strip artists, and his flat characters, without contours or body, have a sort of jack-in- the-box energy and a sardonic obstinacy. The Chicago School 1 have frankly never been able to understand--a parochialism on my part, or a tribute to its exceptional privacy and sophistication. It pretends, of course, to be simple, but the fate of every metropolis is to enter its small-town period at one time or another, to call itself a village, to build a town hall and sink a town pump with a silver handle. The Gumps are common people and the residents of Gasoline Alley are just folks, but I have never been able to understand what they are doing; 1 suspect they do nothing. It seems to me I read columns of conversation daily, and have to continue to the next day to follow the story. The campaign of Andy Gump for election to the Senate gave a little body to the serial storyhe was so abysmally the ignorant Congressman that he began to live. But apart from this, apart from the despairing cry of " Oh, Min, " one recalls nothing of the Chicago School except the amusing vocabulary of Syd Smith and that Andy has no chin. It is an excellent symbol; but it isn't enough for daily food.

The small-town school of comic strip flourishes, in the work of Briggs, already mentioned, in Wester's swift sketches of a similar nature, and in Tom

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MacNamara's Us Boys. The last of these is an exceptional fake as small-town, but an amusing and genuine strip. It is people by creation of fancy--the alarmingly fat, amiable Skinny, the truculent Eaglebeak Spruder, the little high-brow Van with his innocence and his spectacles, and Emily, if I recall the name, the village vampire at the age of seven. Little happens in Us Boys, but MacNamara has managed to convey a genuine emotion in tracing the complicated relations between his personages-there is actual childhood friendship, actual worry and pride and anger--all rather gently rendered, and with a recognizable language.

It is interesting to note that none of these strips make use of the projectile or the blow as a regular denouement. I have nothing against the solution by violence of delicate problems, but since the comic strip is supposed to be exclusively devoted to physical exploits I think it is well to remark how placid life is in at least one significant branch of the art. In effect all the themes of the comic strip are subjected to a great variety of treatments, and in each of them you will find, on occasions, the illustrated joke. This is the weakest of the strips, and, as if aware of its weakness, its creators give it the snap ending of a blow, or, failing that, show us one character in consternation at the brilliance of the other's wit, flying out of the picture with the cry of " Zowie, " indicating his surcharge of emotion. This is not the same

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thing as the wilful violence of Mutt and Jeff, where the attack is due to the malice or stupidity of one character, the resentment or revenge of the other.

Mutt is a picaro, one of the few rogues created in America. There is nothing too dishonest for him, nor is there any chance so slim that he won't take it. He has an object in life: he does not do mean or vicious things simply for the pleasure of doing them, and so is vastly superior to the Peck's Bad Boy type of strip which has an apparently endless voguethe type best known in The Katzenjammer Kids. This is the least ingenious, the least interesting as drawing, the sloppiest in colour, the weakest in conception and in execution, of all the strips, and it is the one which has determined the intellectual idea of what all strips are like. It is now divided into two-and they are equally bad. How happy one could be with neither! The other outstanding picaresque strip is Happy Hooligan-the type tramp who with his brother, Gloomy Gus, had added to the gallery of our national mythology. Non est qualis erat --the spark has gone out of him in recent years [1]. Elsewhere you still find that exceptionally immoral and dishonest attitude toward the business standards of America. For the comic strip, especially after you leave the domestic-relations type which is it

[1] A number of comic-strip artists, on achieving fame, stop drawing, leaving that work to copyists of exceptional skill. I do not know whether this is the case in the Happy Hooligan strip.

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self realistic and unsentimental, is specifically more violent, more dishonest, more tricky and roguish, than America usually permits its serious arts to be. The strips of cleverness: Foxy Grandpa, The Boy Inventor, Hawkshaw the Detective, haven't great vogue. Boob McNutt, without a brain in his head, beloved by the beautiful heiress, has a far greater following, although it is the least worthy of Rube Goldberg's astonishing creations. But Mutt and Jiggs and Abie the Agent, and Barney Google and Eddie's Friends have so little respect for law, order, the rights of property, the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all the other foundations of American life, that if they were put into fiction the Society for the Suppression of Everything would hale them incontinently to court and our morals would be saved again.

The Hall-room Boys (now known as Percy and Ferdy, I think) are also picaresque; the indigent pretenders to social eminence who do anything to get on. They are great bores, not because one foresees the denunciation at the end, but because they somehow fail to come to life, and one doesn't care whether they get away with it or not.

Abie and Jerry on the Job are good strips because they are self-contained, seldom crack jokes, and have each a significant touch of satire. Abie is the Jew of commerce and the man of common sense; you have seen him quarrel with a waiter because of an overcharge of ten cents, and, encouraged by his

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companion, replying, " Yes, and it ain't the principle, either; it's the ten cents." You have seen a thousand tricks by which he once sold Complex motor cars and now promotes cinema shows or prize fights. He is the epitome of one side of his race, and his attractiveness is as remarkable as his jargon. Jerry's chief fault is taking a stock situation and prolonging it; his chief virtue, at the moment, is his funny, hardboiled attitude towards business. Mr Givney, the sloppy sentimentalist who is pleased because some one took him for Mr Taft (" Nice, clean fun, " says Jerry of that), is faced with the absurd Jerry, who demolishes efficiency systems and the romance of big business and similar nonsense with his devastating logic or his complete stupidity. The railway station at New Monia hasn't the immortal character of The Toonerville Trolley (that meets all the trains) because Fontaine Fox has a far more entertaining manner than Hoban, and because Fox is actually a caricaturist--all of his figures are grotesque, the powerful Katinka or Aunt Eppie not more so than the Skipper. Hoban and Hershfield both understate; Fox exaggerates grossly; but with his exaggeration he is so ingenious, so inventive that each strip is funny and the total effect is the creation of character in the Dickens sense. It is not the method of Mutt and Jeff nor of Barney Google in which Billy de Beck has done much with a luckless wight, a sentimentalist, and an endearing fool all rolled into one.

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These are the strips which come to life each day, without forcing, and which stay long in memory. I am stating the case for the strip in general and have gone so far as to speak well of some 1 do not admire, nor read with animation. The continued existence of others remains a mystery to me; why they live beyond change, and presumably beyond accidental death, is one of the things no one can profitably spec ulate upon. I do not see why I should concede any thing more to the enemies of the strip. In one of Life 's burlesque numbers there was a page of comics expertly done by j held in the manner of our most popular artists. Each of the half dozen strips illustrated the joke: 'Who was that lady I seen you with on the street last night? " " That wasn't a lady; that was my wife." Like so many parodies, this arrived too late, for the current answer is, That wasn't a street; that was an alley." Each picture ended in a slam and a cry--also belated. The actual demolition of the slam ending was accomplished by T. E. Pow ers, who touches the field of the comic strip rarely, and then with his usual ferocity. In a footnote to a cartoon he drew Mike and Mike. In six pictures four represented one man hitting the other; once to emphasize a pointless joke, twice thereafter for no reason at all, and finally to end the picture. It was destruction by exaggeration; and no comic strip artist missed the point.

At the extremes of the comic strip are the realistic

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school and the fantastic--and of fantasy there are but few practitioners. Tad has some of the quality in Judge Rummy, but for the most part the Judge' and Fedink and the rest are human beings dressed up as dogs--they are out of Aesop, not out of LaFontaine. But the Judge is actually funny, and I recall an inhuman and undoglike episode in which he and Fedink each claimed to have the loudest voice, and so in midwinter, in a restaurant, each lifted up his voice and uttered and shouted and bellowed the word " Strawberries" until they were properly thrown into the street. This is the kind of madness which is required in fantasy, and Goldberg occasionally has it. He is the most versatile of the lot; he has created characters, and scenes, and continuous episodesfoolish questions and meetings of ladies' clubs and inventions (not so good as Heath Robinson's) and through them there has run a wild grotesquerie. The tortured statues of his decors are marvelous, the way he pushes stupidity and ugliness to their last possible point, and humour into everything, is amazing. Yet I feel he is manque, because he has never found a perfect medium for his work.

Frueh is a fine artist in caricature and could have no such difficulty. When he took it into his head to do a daily strip he was bound to do something exceptional, and he succeeded. It is a highly sophisticated thing in its humour, in its subjects, and pre-eminently in its execution. His series on prohibition enforce

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ment had infinite ingenuity, so also his commentaries on political events in New York city. He remains a caricaturist in these strips, indicating, by his use of the medium, that its possibilities are not exhausted. Yet for all his dealing with " ideas" his method remains fantastic, and although he isn't technically a comic-strip artist he is the best approach to the one artist whom I have only mentioned, George Herriman, and to his immortal creation. For there is, in and outside the comic strip, a solitary and incomprehensible figure which must be treated apart: The Krazy Kat that Walks by Himself.

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The Krazy Kat That Walks By Himself

(pages 231-245)

 

KRAZY KAT, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in America to-day. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and fantasy-exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish The Revolt of the Angels; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the major arts. It happens that in America iron and fantasy are practised in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash; and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine. It is the result of a naive sensibility rather like that of the douanier Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a thought-out, a constructed piece of work. In the second order of the world's art it is superbly first rate-and a delight! For ten years, daily and frequently on Sunday, Krazy Kat has appeared in America; in that time we have accepted and praised a hundred fakes from Europe and Asia-silly and trashy plays, bad painting, woful operas, iniquitous religions, everything paste and brummagem, has had its vogue with us; and a genuine, honest native product has gone unnoticed until in the year of grace 1922 a ballet brought it a tardy and grudging acclaim.

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Herriman is our great master of the fantastic and his early career throws a faint light on the invincible creation which is his present masterpiece. For all of his other things were comparative failures. He could not find, in the realistic framework he chose, an appropriate medium for his imaginings, or even for the strange draughtsmanship which is his natural mode of expression. The Family Upstairs seemed to the realist reader simply incredible; it failed to give him the pleasure of recognizing his neighbours in their more ludicrous moments. The Dingbats, hapless wretches, had the same defect. Another strip came nearer to providing the right tone: Don Koyote and Sancho Pansy; Herriman's mind has always been preoccupied with the mad knight of La Mancha, who reappears transfigured in Krazy Kat. And-although the inspirations are never literary-when it isn't Cervantes it is Dickens to whom he has the greatest affinity. The Dickens mode operated in Baron Bean -a figure half Micawber, half Charlie Chaplin as man of the world. I have noted, in writing of Chaplin, Mr Herriman’s acute and sympathetic appreciation of the first few moments of The Kid. It is only fair to say here that he had himself done the same thing in his medium. Baron Bean was always in rags, penniless, hungry; but he kept his man Grimes, and Grimes did his dirty work, Grimes was the Baron's outtlet, and Grimes, faithful retainer, held by bonds of admiration and respect, helped the Baron in his

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one great love affair. Like all of Herriman's people, they lived on the enchanted mesa (pronounced: macey) by Coconino, near the town of Yorba Linda. The Baron was inventive; lacking the money to finance the purchase of a postage stamp, he entrusted a love letter to a carrier pigeon; and his " Go, my paloma, " on that occasion, is immortal.

Some of these characters are reappearing in Herriman's latest work: Stumble Inn. Of this I have not seen enough to be sure. It is a mixture of fancy and realism; Mr Stumble himself is the Dickens character again-the sentimental, endearing innkeeper who would rather lose his only patron than kill a favourite turkey cock for Thanksgiving. I have heard that recently a litter of pups has been found in the cellar of the inn; so I should judge that fantasy has won the day. For it is Herriman's bent to disguise what he has to say in creations of the animal world which are neither human nor animal, but each sui generis.

That is how the Kat started. The thought of a friendship between a cat and a mouse amused Herriman and one day he wrote them in as a footnote to The Family Upstairs. On their first appearance they played marbles while the family quarreled; and in the last picture the marble dropped through a hole in the bottom line. An office boy named Willie was the first to recognize the strange virtues of Krazy Kat. As surely as he was the greatest of office boys, so the

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greatest of editors, Arthur Brisbane, was the next to praise. He urged Herriman to keep the two characters in action; within a week they began a semi-independent existence in a strip an inch wide under the older strip. Slowly they were detached, were placed at one side, and naturally stepped into the full character of a strip when the Family departed. In time the Sundays appeared-three quarters of a page, involving the whole Krazy Kat and Ignatz families' and the flourishing town of Coconino-the flora and fauna of that enchanted region which Herriman created out of his memories of the Arizona desert he so dearly loves.

In one of his most metaphysical pictures Herriman presents Krazy as saying to Ignatz: " I ain't a Kat... and I ain't Krazy" (I put dots to indicate the lunatic shifting of background which goes on while these remarks are made; although the action is continuous and the characters motionless, it is in keeping with Herriman's method to have the backdrop in a continual state of agitation; you never

 

[1] I must hasten to correct an erroneous impression which may have caused pain to many of Krazy's admirers. The three children, Milton, Marshall, and Irving, are of Ignatz, not, as Mr Stark Young says, of Krazy. Krazy is not an unmarried mother. For the sake of the record I may as well note here the names of the other principals: Offisa Bull Pupp; Mrs Ignatz Mice; Kristofer Kamel; Joe Bark the moon hater; Don Kiyoti, that inconsequential heterodox; Joe Stork, alias Jose Cigueno; Mock Duck; Kolin Kelly the brick merchant, Walter Cephus Austridge; and the Kat Klan: Aunt Tabby, Uncle Tom, Krazy Katbird, Osker Wildcat, Alec Kat, and the Krazy Katfish.

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know when a shrub will become. a redwood, or a hut a church)... " it's wot's behind me that I am... it's the idea behind me, 'Ignatz' and that's wot I am." In an attitude of a contortionist Krazy points to the blank space behind him, and it is there that we must look for the " Idea." It is not far to seek. There is a plot and there is a theme-and considering that since 1913 or so there have been some three thousand strips, one may guess that the variations are infinite. The plot is that Krazy (androgynous, but according to his creator willing to be either) is in love with Ignatz Mouse; Ignatz, who is married, but vagrant, despises the Kat, and his one joy in life is to " Krease that Kat's bean with a brick" from the brickyard of Kolin Kelly. The fatuous Kat (Stark Young has found the perfect word for him: he is crack-brained) takes the brick, by a logic and a cosmic memory presently to be explained, as a symbol of love; he cannot, therefore, appreciate the efforts of Offisa B. Pupp to guard him and to entrammel the activities of Ignatz Mouse (or better, Mice). A deadly war is waged between Ignatz and Offisa Pupp-the latter is himself romantically in love with Krazy; and one often sees pictures in which Krazy and Ignatz conspire together to outwit the officer, both wanting the same thing, but with motives all at cross-purposes. This is the major plot; it is clear that the brick has little to do with the violent endings of other strips, for it is surcharged with emotions. It frequently

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comes not at the end, but at the beginning of an action; sometimes it does not arrive. It is a symbol.

The theme is greater than the plot. John Alden Carpenter has pointed out in the brilliant little foreword' to his ballet, that Krazy Kat is a combination of Parsifal and Don Quixote, the perfect fool and the perfect knight. Ignatz is Sancho Panza and, I should say, Lucifer. He loathes the sentimental excursions, the philosophic ramblings of Krazy; he interrupts with a well-directed brick the romantic excesses of his companion. For example: Krazy blindfolded and with the scales of Justice in his hand declares: " Things is all out of perpotion, 'Ignatz.' " " In what way, fool! " enquires the Mice as the scene shifts to the edge of a pool in the middle of the desert. " In the way of 'ocean' for a instinct." " Well! " asks Ignatz. They are plunging head down into midsea, and only their hind legs, tails, and words are visible: " The ocean is so innikwilly distribitted." They appear, each prone on a mountain peak, above the clouds, and the Kat says casually across the chasm to Ignatz: " Take 'Denva, Kollorado and 'Tulsa, Okrahoma' they ain't got no ocean a tall-" (they are tossed by a vast sea, together in a packing-case) " while Sem Frencisco, Kellafornia, and Bostin, Messachoosit, has got more ocean than they can possibly use" -whereon Ignatz properly distributes a brick evenly on Krazy's noodle. Ignatz " has no time" for

 

[1] See Appendix.

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foolishness; he is a realist and Sees Things as They ARE. " I don't believe in Santa Claus, " says he; " I'm too broad-minded and advanced for such nonsense."

But Mr Herriman, who is a great ironist, understands pity. It is the destiny of Ignatz never to know what his brick means to Krazy. He does not enter into the racial memories of the Kat which go back to the days of Cleopatra, of the Bubastes, when Kats were held sacred. Then, on a beautiful day, a mouse fell in love with Krazy, the beautiful daughter of Kleopatra, Kat; bashful, advised by a soothsayer to write his love, he carved a declaration on a brick and, tossing the " missive, " was accepted, although he had nearly killed the Kat. " When the Egyptian day is done it has become the Romeonian custom to crease his lady's bean with a brick laden with tender sentiments... through the tide of dusty years"... the tradition continues. But only Krazy knows this. So at the end it is the incurable romanticist, the victim of acute Bovaryisme, who triumphs; for Krazy faints daily in full possession of his illusion, and Ignatz, stupidly hurling his brick, thinking to injure, fosters the illusion and keeps Krazy " heppy."

Not always, to be sure. Recently we beheld Krazy smok an " eligint Hawanna cigar" and sighing for Ignatz; the smoke screen he produced hid him from view when Ignatz passed, and before the Mice could turn back, Krazy had handed over the

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cigar to Offisa Pupp and departed, saying " Looking at 'Offisa Pupp' smoke himself up like a chimly is werra werra intrisking, but it is more wital that I find 'Ignatz' " -wherefore Ignatz, thinking the smoke screen a ruse, hurls his brick, blacks the officer's eye, and is promptly chased by the limb of the law. Up to this point you have the usual technique of the comic strip, as old as Shakespeare. But note the final picture of Krazy beholding the pursuit, himself disconsolate, unbricked, alone, muttering: " Ah, there him is-playing tag with 'Offisa Pupp'-just like the boom compenions wot they is." It is this touch of irony and pity which transforms all of Herriman's work, which relates it, for all that the material is preposterous, to something profoundly true and moving. It isn't possible to retell these pictures; but that is the only way, until they are collected and published, that I can give the impression of Herriman's gentle irony, of his understanding of tragedy, of the sancta simplicitas, the innocent loveliness in the heart of a creature more like Pan than any other creation of our time.

Given the general theme, the variations are innumerable, the ingenuity never flags. I use haphazard examples from 1918 to 1923, for though the Kat has changed somewhat since the days when he was even occasionally feline, the essence is the same. Like Charlot, he was always living in a world of his own, and subjecting the commonplaces of actual life

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to the test of his higher logic. Does Ignatz say that " the bird is on the wing, " Krazy suspects an error and after a careful scrutiny of bird life says that " from rissint obserwation I should say that the wing is on the bird." Or Ignatz observes that Don Kiyote is still running. Wrong, says the magnificent Kat: " he is either still or either running, but not both still and both running." Ignatz passes with a bag containing, he says, bird-seed. " Not that I doubt your word, Ignatz, " says Krazy, " but could I give a look! " And he is astonished to find that it is bird-seed, after all, for he had all the time been thinking that birds grew from eggs. It is Ignatz who is impressed by a falling star; for Krazy " them that don't fall" are the miracle. I recommend Krazy to Mr Chesterton, who, in his best moments, will understand. His mind is occupied with eternal oddities, with simple things to which his nature leaves him unreconciled. See him entering a bank and loftily writing a check for thirty million dollars. " You haven't that much money in the bank, " says the cashier. " I know it, " replies Krazy; " have you? " There is a drastic simplicity about Krazy's movements; he is childlike, regarding with grave eyes the efforts of older people to be solemn, to pretend that things are what they seem; and like children he frightens us because none of our pretensions escapes him. A king to him is a " royal cootie." " Golla, " says he, " I always had a ida they was grend, and megnifishint, and wondafil, and me

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jestic... but my goodniss! It ain't so." ' He should be given to the enfant terrible of Hans Andersen who knew the truth about kings.

He is, of course, blinded by love. Wandering alone in springtime, he suffers the sight of all things pairing off; the solitude of a lonesome pine worries him and when he finds a second lonesome pine he comes in the dead of night and transplants one to the side of the other, " so that in due course, Nature has her way." But there are moments when the fierce pang of an unrequited passion dies down. " In these blissfil hours my soul will know no strife, " he confides to Mr Bum Bill Bee, who, while the conversation goes on, catches sight of Ignatz with a brick, flies off, stings Ignatz from the field, and returns to hear: " In my Kosmis there will be no feeva of discord... all my immotions will function in hominy and kind feelings." Or we see him at peace with Ignatz himself. He has bought a pair of spectacles, and seeing that Ignatz has none, cuts them in two, so that each may have a monocle. He is gentle, and gentlemanly, and dear; and these divagations of his are among his loveliest moments; for when irony plays about him he is as helpless-as we are.

To put such a character into music was a fine thought, but Mr Carpenter must have known that he was foredoomed to failure. It was a notable effort, for no other of our composers had seen the possibilities; most, I fear, did not care to " lower them

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FRAGMENT FROM THE KRAZY KAT OF THE DOOR. By George Herriman

(The original, of which this reproduces only the central episodes, is in colour. Cf. text, page 244)


selves" by the association. Mr Carpenter caught much of the fantasy; it was exactly right for him to make the opening a parody-The Afternoon Nap of a Faun. The " Class A Fit, " the Katnip Blues were also good. (There exists a Sunday Krazy of this very scene-it is 1919, I think, and shows hundreds of Krazy Kats in a wild abandoned revel in the Katnip field-a rout, a bacchanale, a satyr-dance, an erotic festival, with our own Krazy playing the viola in the corner, and Ignatz, who has been drinking, going to sign the pledge.) Mr Carpenter almost missed one essential thing: the ecstasy of Krazy when the brick arrives at the end; certainly, as Mr Bolm danced it one felt only the triumph of Ignatz, one did not feel the grand leaping up of Krazy's heart, the fulfilment of desire, as the brick fell upon him. The irony was missing. And it was a mistake for Bolm to try it, since it isn't Russian ballet Krazy requires; it is American dance. One man, one man only can do it right, and I publicly appeal to him to absent him from felicity awhile, and though he do it but once, though but a small number of people may see it, to pay tribute to his one compeer in America, to the one creation equalling his own-I mean, of course, Charlie Chaplin. He has been urged to do many things hostile to his nature; here is one thing he is destined to do. Until then the ballet ought to have Johnny and Ray Dooley for its creators. And I hope that Mr Carpenter hasn't driven other composers off

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the subject. There is enough there for Irving Berlin and Deems Taylor to take up. Why don't they? The music it requires is a jazzed tenderness-as Mr Carpenter knew. In their various ways Berlin and Taylor could accomplish it.

They may not be able to write profoundly in the private idiom of Krazy. I have preserved his spelling and the quotations have given some sense of his style. The accent is partly Dickens and partly Yiddish-and the rest is not to be identified, for it is Krazy. It was odd that in Vanity Fair's notorious " rankings, " Krazy tied with Doctor Johnson, to whom he owes much of his vocabulary. There is a real sense of the colour of words and a high imagination in such passages as " the echoing cliffs of Kaibito" and " on the north side of 'wild-cat peak' the 'snow squaws' shake their winter blankets and bring forth a chill which rides the wind with goad and spur, hurling with an icy hand rime, and frost upon a dreamy land musing in the lap of Spring"; and there is the rhythm of wonder and excitement in " Ooy, 'Ignatz' it's awfil; he's got his legs cut off above his elbows, and he's wearing shoes, and he's standing on top of the water."

Nor, even with Mr Herriman's help, will a ballet get quite the sense of his shifting backgrounds. He is alone in his freedom of movement; in his large pictures and small, the scene changes at will-it is actually our one work in the expressionistic mode.

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While Krazy and Ignatz talk they move from mountain to sea; or a tree stunted and flattened with odd ornaments of spots or design, grows suddenly long and thin; or a house changes into a church. The trees in this enchanted mesa are almost always set in flower pots with Coptic and Egyptian designs in the foliage as often as on the pot. There are adobe walls, fantastic cactus plants, strange fungus and growths. And they compose designs. For whether he be a primitive or an expressionist, Herriman is an artist; his works are built up; there is a definite relation between his theme and his structure, and between his lines, masses, and his page. His masterpieces in colour show a new delight, for he is as naive and as assured with colour as with line or black and white. The little figure of Krazy built around the navel, is amazingly adaptable, and Herriman economically makes him express all the emotions with a turn of the hand, a bending of that extraordinary starched bow he wears round the neck, or with a twist of his tail.

And he has had much to express for he has suffered much. I return to the vast enterprises of the Sunday pictures. There is one constructed entirely on the bias. Ignatz orders Krazy to push a huge rock off its base, then to follow it downhill. Down they go, crashing through houses, uprooting trees, tearing tunnels through mountains, the bowlder first, Krazy so intently after that he nearly crashes into it when

[243]

 

it stops. He toils painfully back uphill. " Did it gather any moss! " asks Ignatz. " No." " That's what I thought." " L'il fillossiffa, " comments Krazy, " always seeks the truth, and always he finds it." There is the great day in which Krazy hears a lecture on the ectoplasm, how " it soars out into the limitless ether, to roam willya-nilly, unleashed, unfettered, and unbound" which becomes for him: " Just imegine having your 'ectospasm' running around, William and Nilliam, among the unlimitliss etha-golla it's imbillivibil-" until a toy balloon, which looks like Ignatz precipitates a heroic gesture and a tragedy. And there is the greatest of all, the epic, the Odyssean wanderings of the door:

Krazy beholds a dormouse, a little mouse with a huge door. It impresses him as being terrible that " a mice so small, so dellikit" should carry around a door so heavy with weight. (At this point their Odyssey begins; they use the door to cross a chasm.) " A door is so useless without a house is hitched to it." (It changes into a raft and they go down stream.) " It has no ikkinomikil value." (They dine off the door.) " It leeks the werra werra essentials of helpfilniss." (It shelters them from a hailstorm.) " Historically it is all wrong and misleading." (It fends the lightning.) " As a thing of beauty it fails in every rispeck." (It shelters them from the sun and while Krazy goes on to deliver a lecture: " You never see Mr Steve Door, or Mr Torra Door, or Mr Kuspa

[244]

 

(Courtesy of the artist and the New York American)

KRAZY KAT. By George Herriman

 

Door doing it, do you? " and " Can you imagine my li'l friends Ignatz Mice boddering himself with a door? ") his li'l friend Ignatz has appeared with the brick; unseen by Krazy he hurls it; it is intercepted by the door, rebounds, and strikes Ignatz down. Krazy continues his adwice until the dormouse sheers off, and then Krazy sits down to " concentrate his mind on Ignatz and wonda where he is at."

Such is our Krazy. Such is the work which America can pride itself on having produced, and can hastily set about to appreciate. It is rich with something we have too little of-fantasy. It is wise with pitying irony; it has delicacy, sensitiveness, and an unearthly beauty. The Strange, unnerving, distorted trees, the language inhuman, un-animal, the events so logical, so wild, are all magic carpets and faery foam-all charged with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.

[245]

The Damned Effrontery of the Two-A-Day

(pages 249-263)

 

THE narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New York Tribune; the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde better than Thomas E. Shea did:

" As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield turned to me and with venomous indignation said, 'That is damned effrontery! ' It seemed to be Mr Mansfield's belief that mere dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society."

To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do with upon what meat has this our Caesar fed that he is grown so great. The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of Montgomery and Stone may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediaeval attitude toward strolling players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable and often interesting. The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel tradition in America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana's phrase, without any effort to do it justice.) Montgomery and Stone were in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn't count as Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls went to see him, and so

[249]

 

he was Art. The application to vaudeville is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on Broadway as the grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige may venture into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly how far he has condescended to appear before them and accept, even if he doesn't earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville he is digging his own grave, because there is a stigma attached to the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to " the vestments of refined society." About every ten years the corrupt desire to be refined takes hold of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly and vaudeville remains simple and good.

It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to discuss it without reference to a possibly more noble past. I am well acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I believe, by Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the peculiarly attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which, invented or borrowed by him, has become classic. It leads to excellent prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself need not be all brass. But the attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts,

[250]

 

more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly coloured, zestful, with sharp outlines; and the classic attitude softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts and numbers of a better day; one must say " musichall" or be slain in the passages of the Jordan; in America a reference to the commedia dell'arte is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time must come when it is possible to say, " Vaudeville is. Surely it could never have been worse than this-or for that matter, never better. Let us regard it as it is." The moment must come in the history of general culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is, it happens, the only way I can take it, for in my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called Change Your Act or Go Back to the Woods; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat my breast and begin Einst in meinen Jugendjahren. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four Marxes and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy and Sweeney and Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling

[251]

 

Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.

I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a thing I dislike intensely; there is another sort of refinement in vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of technique. It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice's impersonations is at least partly due to, and has been achieved through, the purely technical mastery she has developed; I am sure that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch and leap aside; they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have to be always " in the picture, " for though the vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable opportunities, it-holds them to strict account; it permits no fumbling, and there are no reparable errors. The materials they use are trivial, yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair's breadth; the wine they serve is light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not a drop must spill over. There is no great second act to redeem a false entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment's dulness.

[252]

 

The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the presentation, every page has to be written, every scene rendered, every square inch of the canvas must be painted, not daubed with paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case is exactly that of the major arts. It is at least tenable that in this case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.

And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville when the tricky and the bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to vaudeville to see or hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest aesthetic dancing, ' have heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have witnessed " drama." If vaudeville requires half of what I have said, how do these things get in and get by! Largely as a concession to debased public taste. Note well that all the culture elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are importations. The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its Proper music is ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness the success of A Slice of Life) is burlesque. Yet like every other popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their boast that it does

 

[1] Heywood Broun has discovered that everybody in vaudeville is an " artist" except the trained seal.

[253]

 

give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing is heard in connexion with the music played at moving-picture houses) because among its native acts appear tableaux vivants out of Landseer or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of Les Mis& eacuterables. The process continues, regrettably, and extends to the spoiling of good vaudeville material. It isn't a loss of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is a defamation of something good in the major line and equally a loss of moments when the " Affairs of" Anatol are inexpertly and tastelessly produced " for vaudeville." But what shall we say of such a real disaster as the return of Miss Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New York, wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has become a " great actress" or is it " an artiste"? There was in Miss Levey something roughly elemental, something common and pure; whatever she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success abroad, she returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing, the form heavy but dominant-yet no longer vaudeville. She has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and silk-shaded lamps and draperies and sings All by Myself with shocking bad sentimental acting, and gets all she can out

[254]

 

VAUDEVILLE. By Charles Demuth

 

of Love's Old Sweet Song before the touch of her old spirit protests-and recites a dramatic monologue entitled Destiny! Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can't be good in it if you are too good for it.

I omit the people who aren't, simply, good enough; there are second-rate people in vaudeville as in everything else, and first-rate people of its second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced, is rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate, nor in the serious artistic playhouse where knowing one's job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest things in the world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch of technical accuracy which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and stars, whom they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety themselves. They are as much entitled to the jazz bands as any other stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety, although it has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland's ranking of Ted Lewis as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be perfectly appreciated elsewhere. (The aesthetics of the question have been canvassed in Laoko& oumln, I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up the show in

[255]

 

musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack Donahue, who was the sole attraction of an- other such piece, is always right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular of the big-time acts I am left cold by Van and Schenck, who are perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny, but not witty; their music is current, -no more; their rendition is always near enough right to be passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the Six Brown Brothers are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent act, wholly self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other framework, except possibly a one-ring circus; it is a real variety turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these performers everything they do is exquisite.

It isn't possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the distinctive quality of the head-liners. There are inexplicable things in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch, such as the persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the singing of Belle Baker, who destroys you with Elie! Elie! Houdini is variety as all magicians are and all tricksters-the circus side of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath

[256]

 

Brothers, who alone are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the circus. At the present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it burlesques itself. Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the manner of a clown; his despairing cry for the " spot li-i-i-ght, " his wail of unhappiness, with his appearance, his gesture, his shambling walk, make him a figure out of the commedia dell'arte -one of the few in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their m& eacutetier; their whole fun is in their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of burlesque the accentuated form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to that type, and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real character with his jumping the rope " fi' thousand conseggitiv times" and " tell 'em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O'Brien." I am dragged into a catalogue of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit the macabre Moving-Man's Dream of the Briants, the rustic studies of Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers, and the exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries farther than anyone else the appearance of not knowing the audience is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of human beings, individually probably all right, but en masse...! He leaves the stage and passes

[257]

 

out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse itself while he's gone. And his great finale, with a bowl of goldfish, a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated paper bag, and a revolver shot-at the sound of which exactly nothing happens, is the last word in destroying the paraphernalia of the magician and all his works.

I have committed myself to the statement that Joe Cook is perfect and am in no mood to withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can see him in no other milieu because he lacks the gift-not needed in vaudeville, though useful there-of holding the audience in his hand. He is liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles, smiles, and laughter; seldom with guffaws. This is not necessarily to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville is made. As Ethel Levey is what most vaudeville players aspire to be, so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right. Yet to give the quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.

He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is a master of parody and burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the " dippy" kind

[258]

 

so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is structural. Mr Cook's is probably the longest single act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the programme, as his fancy takes him.

His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to-but no one has ever discovered where it does go to. For after the card tricks-the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks af ter five minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a moment's notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is-Mr Cook finds it necessary to explain to the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin would savour his humours.

In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry; but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are you? Fine, how's yourself? Good. And you? Splendid.

[259]

 

How's your uncle? I haven't got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He's fine. How are you? He is amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week. His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I have ever seen: George M. Cohan.

Had I had any doubts about vaudeville as we practice it in the United States they would have been dispelled in the past two years by one great success and one notable failure: the Chauve-Souris of Balieff and the show of the Forty-niners. Balieff seemed for a moment to be destroying B. F. Keith; here was something certainly vaudeville, with turns and numbers, appealing to every grade of intelligence; here were good music, exciting scenery, and good fun; here were voices caressing the ear and dancers dazzling the eye; here was a gay burlesque and a sophisticated conf& eacuterencier. Now if our native product were only like that... (the implication was, Wouldn't we just go every day to the nearest vaudeville house!). Then, to be sure, a reaction. Put Ed Wynn and Leon Errol and... I omit the list-Wynn was almost unanimously chosen as conf& eacuterencier -and we could give the Russians at least a good run for the money-and it was money, loads

[260]

 

of it, much to their surprise. And then, without Ed Wynn and the list, the attempt; for the Forty-niners were cheerfully setting out to be a company of Americans stranded in Russia, giving the Russians to understand what the folk and popular arts of America were. Months earlier the thing had been perfectly done, as a game, in the No-Siree, a wholly amateur single performance which was without doubt the gayest evening of the year in New York. (The tribute is not exactly wrung from me, for friends of mine were concerned in it; it was the high moment of the Algonquin Circle and they should have disbanded the following morning. Since I was not an adherent of the group, my advice was not asked; I do not know whether it still exists, has passed to further triumphs, or has repeated the Forty-niners.) Put on professionally, high class vaudeville showed all the weaknesses of the commercial kind, and had a dulness of its own. The Dance of the Small-town Mayors was exactly right, but most of the parodies were outdated, the burlesques were too voulus, the strain too great. There was lacking that technical proficiency which is essential to vaudeville, and the adjustment of means to material was sloppy. One fell back on Balieff and discovered, as the exoticism wore off, that he too had his weak points. Sentimental songs in however beautiful voices, the choreographics of figures come to life from Copenhagen plate however accurately the footfall coincided with Anitra's Dance, and a

[261]

 

number of other things suggested that in Russia, too, refinement could corrupt and stultify. There remained elements we could not match: we hadn't encouraged our legitimate stage sufficiently to be justified in expecting cubist settings in vaudeville; nor when we heard American folk music (and its contemporary form in ragtime) did we so earnestly applaud as to keep them fresh in variety shows. Balieff never was " variety, " and we asked of variety that it be like him; we missed the meaning of Balieff as surely as we appreciated the fun. For he was a lesson not to vaudeville, but to us, to those of us who left vaudeville in the hands of the least cultivated audiences. We have asked nothing of vaudeville simply because we haven't suspected what it had to give. Yet week after week at the Palace Theatre in New York there have been bills equal in entertainment to the average Balieff programme; there has been evident an expertness in technique, a skill in construction, a naturalness of execution, a soundness of sense and judgement, which ought to have appealed to all who had taste and discrimination. The people who do go there have something, at least; and lack snobbism generally. If the audiences of the Theatre Guild and the Neighborhood Playhouse were to add themselves to their number, were to accept what is given and be receptive to something more, it could not hurt vaudeville. Because like everything else variety must grow, and there is no

[262]

 

reason why it should shut itself off from the direction of civilized life. It can exist very well without the Theatre Guild audience; I wonder whether that audience can exist as well without variety.

[263]

They Call it Dancing

(pages 265-274)

 

ONE of the most tiresome of contemporary intellectual sentimentalities is the cult of " the dance" a cult which has almost nothing in the world to do with dancing. " The dance" is " art"; dancing is a form of Popular entertainment, one of the very few which can be practised by its admirers. It is also one of the arts which can be " polite" without danger of atrophy, the danger in this case being that the technical refinement may eventually make dancing a trick, a rather graceful sort of juggling.

In any case, we shall not have in America anything corresponding to folk dances; the ritual dance, the dance as religion, simply isn't our type, and none of the tentatives in favour of that kind of dancing has made me regret our natural bent toward ballroom and stunt dancing as a mode of expression. In the rue Lappe in Paris nearly every otherhouse is a Bal Musette and in all but one of these dancehalls the floor is taken by men and women of that quarter, working men and women who come in and dance and pay afew sous for each dance. They do this every night and enjoyit; they enjoy the sometimes wheezing accordeon and the bells which, on the right ankle of the player, -accentuate the beat. They dance waltzes and polkas and, since the Java is forbidden, the mazurka. Once I saw two couples rise and dance the bourree, presumably as it was danced in their native province of Auvergne; it is possible to see other provincial dances of France, as they are re-

[267]

 

membered, in the Bal Musette of this district and elsewhere-- occasionally and not by pre-arrangement. The ancient dances of America haven't such roots, nor such vitality; and we may have to become much more simple, or much more sophisticated, before we will proceed naturally to buck-and-wing and cakewalk and the ordinary breakdown on the floor of the Palais Royal. There are Kentucky mountain and cowboy dances which the moving picture inadequately reconstructs, and I am afraid that even negro levee dancing has lost much of its own character in the process of influencing the steps of the ordinary American dance. Undoubtedly those who can should preserve these provincial and rooted dances; but it is idle to pretend that dancing itself can be a subject for archeology. It is essentially for action, not for speculation.I do not belittle dancing when I attempt to deprive it of the cachet of " Art." Nothing so precise, so graceful, so implicated with music, can escape being artistic; in the hands of its masters it becomes art intuitive creative process, but this happens most frequently when the dancer gives himself to the music and seldom when he tries to interpret the music.

From the waltz to the tango, from the tango to the current foxtrot or one-step, polite dancing has held more of what is essentially artistic than the art-dance, and it has had no pretensions. The old tango and the maxixe were the only ones which could not easily be

[268]

 

IRENE CASTLE

danced by those who applauded them on the stage; classic dancing, on the contrary, has always been an art of professionals-almost a contradiction in terms in this case, for it is the essence of the dance that it can be danced. It is not the essence of the dance that it can be staged, or made into a pantomime. The Russian Ballet has no reference to the subject for it is essentially the work of mimes and the dancing is either folk dance or choreography.

The reason politeness is not fatal to the dance is that there is only one standard of vulgarity in dancing, which is ugliness. Vulgarity means actively disagreeable postures and steps not exceptionally adapted to the music. The relation of the dancers to one another is the basis of their relation to the music, and that is why the shimmy has little to do with dancing, whereas the cheek-to-cheek position-the bite-noire of chaperons a few weeks, or is it years, ago? – is fundamentally not objectionable, since it brings two dancers to as near a unit, with the same centre of gravity, as the dance requires. One doesn't dance the fox-trot as one danced the Virginia reel, and the question of morals has little to do with the case. The " Indecencies" of the turkey-trot, as we used to phrase it, disappeared not because we are better men and women, but because we are dancing more beautifully. Two influences have worked to accomplish this. One is that our music has become more interesting

[269]

 

and is written specifically to be danced, as the waltzsong always was and as our older ragtime was not. The other is the effect of the stage (through which we have, recently, learned a vast amount from negro dancing, an active influence for the last fifteen yea






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