A History of American Literature

Mr. Augustus Thomas has lived in the atmosphere of the theater from boyhood. He began writing plays at fourteen, was directing an amateur company at seventeen, and had his first New York success in his twenty-eighth year. Since 1887 he has been a professional playwright; he has nearly fifty productions to his credit, and he is now art director of the Charles Frohman interests. His first widely known works were the plays of states: “Alabama” (1891), “In Mizzoura” (1893), and “Arizona” (1899) – plays which exerted the same general appeal as “Shenandoah” and “Barbara Frietchie.” As a practical man of the theater he adapted and worked over material, dramatizing novels of Mrs. Burnett, Hopkinson Smith, and Townsend. His attractive “Oliver Goldsmith” was built not only around the character of that whimsical man of letters but included as its own best portion an act out of the hero’s play “The Good-Natured Man.” With the kind of adaptability which belongs equally to the practical man of the theater and to the enterprising journalist, he undertook in time the type of play that deals with questions or problems of modern interest. The same current of speculation that led Mark Twain to write his essay on “Mental Telepathy” and Hamlin Garland his book on “The Shadow World” accounts for Thomas’s “The Witching Hour” (1907), which interweaves the strands of hereditary influence and mental suggestion; and he contributed his word on the complex problems of the modern family in “As a Man Thinks” (1911). Up to 1917 he had written and adapted forty-six plays, of which eleven had been published after their production, but his work of real distinction belongs to the period opening with “The Witching Hour.” In his later plays he has coupled his highly developed ability to tell a story with a vital feeling for the positive values in life. In “The Harvest Moon” he makes a playwright-character say, “I would willingly give the rest of my life to go back and take from my plays every word that has made men less happy, less hopeful, less kind.” And in “The Witching Hour” he declares through Jack Brookfield the text of that and succeeding plays, “You’re a child of the everlasting God and nothing on the earth or under it can harm you in the slightest degree” – a text which, said of the soul, is immortally true.

In a short chapter it is impossible to discuss in detail any other of the play-writers who have done with less applause but with no less devotion the kind of writing represented by the best of Fitch and Thomas; and it would be invidious to attempt a mere list of the others, as if a mention of their names would be a sop to their pride. The case must rest here with the statement that these two men were the leaders of an increasing group and that the desire to compose more skillful and more worthy plays was paralleled by a revival of respect for the modern drama and the modern stage. This leads to the middle section of our survey, and turns from the drama itself to the fifteen-year struggle for possession of the American stage – the actual “boards” on which the plays could be presented. It is as dramatic as any play, this story of the conflict between intelligent idealism, – whether in playwright, actor or theatergoer, and commercial greed, – and it is far from concluded, though a happy dénouement seems to be in sight.

The first step has already been mentioned: the development of a student attitude toward the contemporary play and its production. Professor Baker at Harvard and Professor Matthews at Columbia were looked at by some with wonder and by others with amused doubt when they began as teachers to divide their attention between the ancient and the modern stage. Yet as the study progressed their students became not only intelligent theatergoers but constructive contributors, as critics and creators, to the literature of the stage; and then in the natural order of events the whole student body came to realize that the older drama should be reduced to its proper place and restored to it; that it was an interesting chapter in literary and social history because it was not a closed chapter, but a preliminary to the events of the present. At the same time modest but important beginnings were being made in the education of the actor, and men like Franklin Sargent, President of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, opened the way to a professional training for actors that would compare with the training demanded of and by the singer, painter, or sculptor. These beginnings were full of promise, but the promise was to be long held in abeyance by the machinations of the theatrical syndicate.

This commercial trust is the heavy villain of the play, the charge against it being that whereas the business management of the theater was called into being in order to serve the drama, it managed so effectively that by the winter of 1895–1896 it was strong enough to demand that henceforth the drama support the business management. The six men who were able to assume control handled their business according to the approved methods of the trust, trying to get salable goods and to multiply the output of what the public wanted, trying to control all the salesmen (players) and all the distributing points (playhouses) and to put out of business any player or local manager who would not market their choice of goods at their schedule of dates and prices. For nearly fifteen years the syndicate were as effective in their field as the Standard Oil or United Shoe Machinery Companies were in theirs. One actress, Mrs. Fiske, endured every sort of discomfort and, no doubt, heavy losses for the privilege of playing what, when, and where she pleased; but for a while she had her own way only to the extent of appearing in theaters so cheap that they were beneath the contempt of the monopoly. In the meanwhile, however, discontent spread, a rival firm of managers erected rival theaters, and, conducting their business on principles of more enlightened selfishness, in 1910 enlisted twelve hundred of the smaller revolting theaters with them and forced the syndicate to share the field. Since that time the theaters of America have been administered as well, perhaps, as the system will allow; but it is a mistaken system that puts a fine art in the market place and demands that it maintain itself because “business is business.”

The first really great attempt to ask anything less of the modern drama in America, to demand no more of the play than is demanded of the opera or the symphony, was the founding of the celebrated and short-lived New Theater in New York (1909–1911). That it failed within two years is not half so important as that it was founded, that others on smaller scales have since been founded and have failed, that municipal theaters have sprung up here and there and are being supported according to various plans, that scores upon scores of little theaters, neighborhood playhouses, and people’s country theaters have been founded, that producers like Winthrop Ames and Stuart Walker are established in public favor, that the Drama League of America is a genuine national organization, and that the printing of plays for a reading public is many fold its proportions of twenty years ago. The Napoleonic theatrical managers are still in the saddle in America, and the commercial stage of the country is still managed from Broadway, but the uncommercial stage is coming to be more considerable every season. The leaven of popular intelligence is at work.

With developments of this sort taking place and gaining in momentum, there is a growing attention to the printed literary drama and an encouraging prospect for it in the theater. As far back as 1891, when Clyde Fitch and Augustus Thomas were coming into their reputations, Richard Hovey (1864–1900) published “The Quest of Merlin,” the first unit in his “Launcelot and Guenevere,” which he described as a poem in dramas. It was a splendidly conceived treatment of the conflict between the claims of individual love and the intruding demands of the outer world. In resorting to the Arthurian legends Hovey “was not primarily interested in them,” according to his friend and expounder, Bliss Carman, “for their historic and picturesque value as poetic material, great as that value undoubtedly is … the problem he felt called upon to deal with is a perennial one, old as the world, yet intensely modern, and it appealed to him as a modern man… The Arthurian cycle provided Tennyson with the groundwork of a national epic; … to Richard Hovey it afforded a modern instance stripped of modern dress.” It was to have been completed in three parts, each containing a masque, a tragedy, and a romantic drama; but only the first was completed – “The Quest of Merlin” (1891), “The Marriage of Guenevere” (1891), and “The Birth of Galahad” (1898). Shortly after finishing “Taliesin,” the masque for the second part, Hovey died.

Another and greater cycle of poetic dramas which was interrupted by a premature death was a trilogy on the Promethean theme by William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910). The theme is the unity of God and man and their consequent mutual dependency. “The Fire-Bringer” (1904) presents man’s victory at the supreme cost of disunion from God through the defiant theft of fire from heaven. “The Masque of Judgment” (1900) is a no less fearful triumph of the Creator in dooming part of himself as he overwhelms mankind. The final part, “The Death of Eve,” was to have achieved the final reconciliation, but it was left a fragment at the poet’s death in 1910 and so stands in the posthumous edition of his works. It is significant in the literary history of the day that the culminating product of both these young poets was an uncompleted poetic play-cycle. Moody’s connection with the stage, however, was closer than Hovey’s, for he wrote two prose plays which were successfully produced – “The Great Divide” (1907) and “The Faith Healer” (1909). In “The Great Divide,” produced first under the title of “The Sabine Woman,” Moody wrote a dramatic story on a fundamental, and hence a modern, aspect of life. The problem of the play is stated flippantly yet truly by the heroine’s sister-in-law:

Here on the one hand is the primitive, the barbaric woman, falling in love with a romantic stranger, who, like some old Viking on a harry, cuts her with his two-handed sword from the circle of her kinsmen, and bears her away on his dragon ship toward the midnight sun. Here on the other hand is the derived, the civilized woman, with a civilized nervous system, observing that the creature eats bacon with his bowie knife, knows not the manicure, has the conversation of a preoccupied walrus, the instincts of a jealous caribou, and the endearments of a dancing crab in the mating season… Ruth is one of those people who can’t live in a state of divided feeling. She sits staring at this cleavage in her life… All I mean is that when she married her man she married him for keeps. And he did the same by her.

The play was produced in Chicago, put on for a long run in New York and on tour, and presented in London, and in 1917 was revived for a successful run in New York again. “The Faith Healer,” the idea for which occurred to Moody in 1898, was completed ten years later, after the success of the first play. The theme is not so close to common experience as that of “The Great Divide,” and perhaps because of this as well as the subtler treatment it did not draw such audiences. Both plays end on a high spiritual level, but the second failed to register in the “box office” because the relief scenes are grim rather than amusing and because there is no fleshly element in the love of the hero and the heroine.

Percy MacKaye (1875-) embodies the meeting of the older traditions – his father was Steele MacKaye (see p. 439) – and the most recent development in American drama, the rise of pageantry and the civic festival. As a professional dramatist he has been prolific to the extent of some twenty-five plays, pageants, and operas. His acted plays have varied in range and subject from contemporary social satire to an interesting succession of echoes from the literary past – plays like “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (1903), “Jeanne D’Arc” (1906), and “Sappho and Phaon” (1907), which he seems to have undertaken, in contrast to Hovey, for their picturesque and poetic value alone. His special contribution, however, has been to the movement for an uncommercialized civic and national theater through the preparation of a number of community celebrations. These include the Saint Gaudens Pageant at Cornish, New Hampshire (1905), the Gloucester Pageant (1903), “Sanctuary, a Bird Masque” (1913), “St. Louis, a Civic Masque” (1914), and “Caliban, a Community Masque” (New York, 1916, and Boston, 1917). The fusing interest in a common artistic undertaking has brought together whole cities in the finest kind of democratic enthusiasm, and the effects have not been merely temporary, for in a community such as St. Louis the permanent benefits are still evident in the community chorus and in the beautiful civic theater which is the annual scene of memorable productions witnessed by scores of thousands of spectators.

Charles Rann Kennedy (1871- ), the last of the dramatists to be considered here, is a man in whom a technical mastery of the play is combined with a high degree of poetic fervor. He was born in Derby, England, coming from a family which has been famed for classical scholarship.39 His own education was largely pursued outside of the schools, and he is not a university man, but no element is more important in his preparation for play-writing than his intimate knowledge of the classical and, especially, the Greek drama. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen he was office boy, clerk, and telegraph operator, but always imaginatively interested in the technical aspects of his jobs. During his early twenties he was a lecturer and writer, and it is a matter of literary as well as personal moment that in 1898 he married Edith Wynne Matthison, widely known for her work with Irving, with Tree, and at the New Theater and as the creator of leading parts in her husband’s plays. Since the beginning of his authorship Mr. Kennedy has lived in the United States, of which he is now a citizen.

His dramatic work has fallen into two groups: “The Terrible Meek” and “The Necessary Evil” – Short Plays for Small Casts – and his Seven Plays for Seven Players. As in the cases of Moody and Hovey already cited, his plays are part of an inclusive program – a program which is the more remarkable on account of the fact that it took definite shape in the course of a single discussion with a group of literary friends – G. B. Shaw, Gilbert Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc among them – before he came to this country. As a result of this discussion he undertook to write seven plays: each for five men and two women, each holding the mien between a heightened and decorative romance and an objective and unimaginative realism, each dealing with a separate great central theme in life, each attempting a new or revived technical difficulty in play construction, and each subjected to the most rigid conformity to the dramatic unities, being written with no break in time sequence or shift of scene.

The series includes (1) “The Winterfeast” (1906), of which the central theme is “The Lie and Hate in Life which destroy”; (2) “The Servant in the House” (1907), on “The Truth and Love in Life which preserve”; (3) “The Idol-Breaker” (1913), on “Freedom”; (4) “The Rib of the Man” (1916), on “The New Woman already in the World, and the New Warrior coming as fast as the European War will let him”; (5) “The Army with Banners” (1917), on “The Coming of the Lord in Power and Glory and the New World now culminating.” Of these five, all but the fourth have been produced, “The Rib of the Man” having been withheld temporarily because of its nonmilitant theme and the resultant managerial timidity; and all but the fifth have been published. The series will be completed with “The Fool from the Hills,” the central theme being “The Bread of Life, or The Food Problem”; and the last will be “The Isle of the Blest,” on “The Consummation of Life in what Men call Death.”

Plays written in such a progression are clearly approached in a spirit of high seriousness and with little regard or any expectation of immediate applause. But they are also written in a spirit of high defiance, with deliberate consciousness of the methods employed, and an inspired certainty that they will be heard at last. Adam – the Idol-Breaker – has thrown down the definite challenge:

“I’ve told these people things before. Many times. Why, it was me, six years ago, as called them here, and told them of the brotherhood of man.” [Cf. “The Servant in the House.”]

“Well, didn’t they listen to you, that time?” says Naomi.

“Ay, at first,” replies Adam, “while I was new to them. Then they turned again to idols; and twisted my plain meaning into tracts for Sunday School. I up and spoke again, and told them of the lies and hate they lived by. [Cf. “The Winterfeast.”] Shewed them the death and bitterness of it! – Well, they soon let me know about that. I preached their own God’s gospel to them, and brought Christ’s Murder to their blood-stained doors. [Cf. “The Terrible Meek.”] They spat upon me. I told them of the lusts as fed their brothels; [cf. “The Necessary Evil”] and every red-eyed wolf among them said I lied. Even when they didn’t speak, I knew the meaning of their leering silence. This time, it’s freedom – the thing they’re always bragging of; and as long as I am in the world, they’ll have it dinned into their heads, as freedom isn’t all a matter of flags and soldiers’ pop-guns. It’s something they’ve got to sweat for. Don’t you think they’re going to get off easy, once I see them stuck in front of me! “Oh, I make them laugh, all right. They want to be amused. Lot of jaded johnnies! Every one of them thinking I mean his next-door neighbor; and I mean just him!”

In “The Winterfeast” there is no laughter; at most only a smile in the first meeting of the two young lovers. It is a relentless tale of Nemesis following on the path of hatred, set in Iceland of the eleventh century, told in the tone and at times plainly in the manner of Sophocles. All the others of the Seven Plays, however, are put in the present day, with characters who are modern examples of perennial types, with abundant “relief scenes” in confirmation of Adam’s “I make them laugh,” and with an undertone of irony, – whimsical, derisive, grave, or bitter, as the occasions demand. Of these “The Servant in the House” has been the preëminent popular success because of its appeal to the conventionally religious, who accepted its pervasive beneficence and ignored its strictures on the church.

None of Mr. Kennedy’s plays is more completely representative of his spirit, his purpose, and his method than “The Rib of the Man.” It is located on an island in the Ægean, amid “the never-ending loveliness of all good Greek things.” It is dedicated to the New Woman, to whom a recently unearthed altar inscribed “To the Mother of the Gods” has given the authority of the ages. The persons of the play are morality types, although intensely human. They are “David Fleming, an image of God, the Man; Rosie Fleming, an help-meet for him, the Rib; Archie Legge, a gentleman, a Beast of the Earth; Basil Martin, an aviator, a Fowl of the Air; Peter Prout, a scientist, the Subtle One; Ion, the gardener, the Voice Warning; and Diana Brand, a spare rib, the Flaming Sword.” And finally, the play is written “with an inner and an outer meaning, symbolical, instinct with paradox and irony, leading deeply unto truth.”

Only one of Mr. Kennedy’s plays has achieved a popular triumph, and the success of that one was due to its limited and somewhat perverted interpretation. They all, however, repay study and disclose new depths with each re-reading. Serious art rarely makes quick conquests. Audiences of spirit and intellect will develop for them as they have for the plays of Ibsen and Maeterlinck. The new audience, the new theater, and the new drama – old as the oldest literature – in due time will come to their own again.