The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
adversary. He smiles and puts all his gratitude into one simple and
touching sentence, 'Ich danke dir,' and dies.
Nothing, I think, could be more moving, more beautiful, than this close.
This piece is just one long, soulful, sardonic laugh at human life. Its
title might properly be 'Is Life a Failure?' and leave the five acts
to play with the answer. I am not at all sure that the author meant to
laugh at life. I only notice that he has done it. Without putting into
words any ungracious or discourteous things about life, the episodes in
the piece seem to be saying all the time, inarticulately: 'Note what
a silly poor thing human life is; how childish its ambitions, how
ridiculous its pomps, how trivial its dignities, how cheap its
heroisms, how capricious its course, how brief its flight, how stingy
in happinesses, how opulent in miseries, how few its prides, how
multitudinous its humiliations, how comic its tragedies, how tragic
its comedies, how wearisome and monotonous its repetition of its stupid
history through the ages, with never the introduction of a new detail;
how hard it has tried, from the Creation down, to play itself upon its
possessor as a boon and has never proved its case in a single instance!'
Take note of some of the details of the piece. Each of the five acts
contains an independent tragedy of its own. In each act someone's
edifice of hope, or of ambition, or of happiness, goes down in ruins.
Even Appelles' perennial youth is only a long tragedy, and his life a
failure. There are two martyrdoms in the piece; and they are curiously
and sarcastically contrasted. In the first act the pagans persecute Zoe,
the Christian girl, and a pagan mob slaughters her. In the fourth act
those same pagans--now very old and zealous--are become Christians, and
they persecute the pagans; a mob of them slaughters the pagan youth,
Nymphas, who is standing up for the old gods of his fathers. No remark
is made about this picturesque failure of civilisation; but there
it stands, as an unworded suggestion that civilisation, even when
Christianised, was not able wholly to subdue the natural man in that
old day--just as in our day the spectacle of a shipwrecked French
crew clubbing women and children who tried to climb into the lifeboats
suggests that civilisation has not succeeded in entirely obliterating
the natural man even yet. Common sailors a year ago, in Paris, at a
fire, the aristocracy of the same nation clubbed girls and women out of
the way to save themselves. Civilisation tested at top and bottom both,
you see. And in still another panic of fright we have this same
tough civilisation saving its honour by condemning an innocent man to
multiform death, and hugging and whitewashing the guilty one.
In the second act a grand Roman official is not above trying to blast
Appelles' reputation by falsely charging him with misappropriating
public moneys. Appelles, who is too proud to endure even the suspicion
of irregularity, strips himself to naked poverty to square the unfair
account, and his troubles begin: the blight which is to continue and
spread strikes his life; for the frivolous, pretty creature whom he
brought from Rome has no taste for poverty and agrees to elope with
a more competent candidate. Her presence in the house has previously
brought down the pride and broken the heart of Appelles' poor old
mother; and her life is a failure. Death comes for her, but is willing
to trade her for the Roman girl; so the bargain is struck with Appelles,
and the mother is spared for the present.
No one's life escapes the blight. Timoleus, the gay satirist of the
first two acts, who scoffed at the pious hypocrisies and money-grubbing
ways of the great Roman lords, is grown old and fat and blear-eyed and
racked with disease in the third, has lost his stately purities, and
watered the acid of his wit. His life has suffered defeat. Unthinkingly
he swears by Zeus--from ancient habit--and then quakes with fright; for
a fellow-communicant is passing by. Reproached by a pagan friend of his
youth for his apostasy, he confesses that principle, when unsupported by
an assenting stomach, has to climb down. One must have bread; and 'the
bread is Christian now.' Then the poor old wreck, once so proud of his
iron rectitude, hobbles away, coughing and barking.
In that same act Appelles give his sweet young Christian daughter and
her fine young pagan lover his consent and blessing, and makes them
utterly happy--for five minutes. Then the priest and the mob come, to
tear them apart and put the girl in a nunnery; for marriage between
the sects is forbidden. Appelles' wife could dissolve the rule; and she
wants to do it; but under priestly pressure she wavers; then, fearing
that in providing happiness for her child she would be committing a sin
dangerous to her own, she goes over to the opposition, and throws the
casting vote for the nunnery. The blight has fallen upon the young
couple, and their life is a failure.
In the fourth act, Longinus, who made such a prosperous and enviable
start in the first act, is left alone in the desert, sick,
blind, helpless, incredibly old, to die: not a friend left in the
world--another ruined life. And in that act, also, Appelles' worshipped
boy, Nymphas, done to death by the mob, breathes out his last sigh in
his father's arms--one more failure. In the fifth act, Appelles himself
dies, and is glad to do it; he who so ignorantly rejoiced, only four
acts before, over the splendid present of an earthly immortality--the
very worst failure of the lot!
II
Now I approach my project. Here is the theatre list for Saturday, May 7,
1898, cut from the advertising columns of a New York paper:
(graphic here)
Now I arrive at my project, and make my suggestion. From the look of
this lightsome feast, I conclude that what you need is a tonic. Send for
'The Master of Palmyra.' You are trying to make yourself believe that
life is a comedy, that its sole business is fun, that there is nothing
serious in it. You are ignoring the skeleton in your closet. Send for
'The Master of Palmyra.' You are neglecting a valuable side of your
life; presently it will be atrophied. You are eating too much mental
sugar; you will bring on Bright's disease of the intellect. You need a
tonic; you need it very much. Send for 'The Master of Palmyra.' You
will not need to translate it; its story is as plain as a procession of
pictures.
I have made my suggestion. Now I wish to put an annex to it. And that
is this: It is right and wholesome to have those light comedies and
entertaining shows; and I shouldn't wish to see them diminished. But
none of us is always in the comedy spirit; we have our graver moods;
they come to us all; the lightest of us cannot escape them. These moods
have their appetites--healthy and legitimate appetites--and there ought
to be some way of satisfying them. It seems to me that New York ought
to have one theatre devoted to tragedy. With her three millions of
population, and seventy outside millions to draw upon, she can afford
it, she can support it. America devotes more time, labour, money and
attention to distributing literary and musical culture among the general
public than does any other nation, perhaps; yet here you find her
neglecting what is possibly the most effective of all the breeders and
nurses and disseminators of high literary taste and lofty emotion--the
tragic stage. To leave that powerful agency out is to haul the
culture-wagon with a crippled team. Nowadays, when a mood comes which
only Shakespeare can set to music, what must we do? Read Shakespeare
ourselves! Isn't it pitiful? It is playing an organ solo on a
jew's-harp. We can't read. None but the Booths can do it.
Thirty years ago Edwin Booth played 'Hamlet' a hundred nights in New
York. With three times the population, how often is 'Hamlet' played now
in a year? If Booth were back now in his prime, how often could he
play it in New York? Some will say twenty-five nights. I will say three
hundred, and say it with confidence. The tragedians are dead; but I
think that the taste and intelligence which made their market are not.
What has come over us English-speaking people? During the first half of
this century tragedies and great tragedians were as common with us as
farce and comedy; and it was the same in England. Now we have not a
tragedian, I believe, and London, with her fifty shows and theatres,
has but three, I think. It is an astonishing thing, when you come to
consider it. Vienna remains upon the ancient basis: there has been no
change. She sticks to the former proportions: a number of rollicking
comedies, admirably played, every night; and also every night at the
Burg Theatre--that wonder of the world for grace and beauty and richness
and splendour and costliness--a majestic drama of depth and seriousness,
or a standard old tragedy. It is only within the last dozen years that
men have learned to do miracles on the stage in the way of grand and
enchanting scenic effects; and it is at such a time as this that we have
reduced our scenery mainly to different breeds of parlours and varying
aspects of furniture and rugs. I think we must have a Burg in New York,
and Burg scenery, and a great company like the Burg company. Then, with
a tragedy-tonic once or twice a month, we shall enjoy the comedies all
the better. Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there
is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional
climb among the solemn pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by
Shakespeare and those others. Do I seem to be preaching? It is out of
my line: I only do it because the rest of the clergy seem to be on
vacation.
TRAVELLING WITH A REFORMER
Last spring I went out to Chicago to see the Fair, and although I did
not see it my trip was not wholly lost--there were compensations. In
New York I was introduced to a Major in the regular army who said he was
going to the Fair, and we agreed to go together. I had to go to Boston
first, but that did not interfere; he said he would go along and put in
the time. He was a handsome man and built like a gladiator. But his
ways were gentle, and his speech was soft and persuasive. He was
companionable, but exceedingly reposeful. Yes, and wholly destitute of
the sense of humour. He was full of interest in everything that went on
around him, but his serenity was indestructible; nothing disturbed him,
nothing excited him.
But before the day was done I found that deep down in him somewhere he
had a passion, quiet as he was--a passion for reforming petty public
abuses. He stood for citizenship--it was his hobby. His idea was that
every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial
policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their
execution. He thought that the only effective way of preserving and
protecting public rights was for each citizen to do his share in
preventing or punishing such infringements of them as came under his
personal notice.
It was a good scheme, but I thought it would keep a body in trouble
all the time; it seemed to me that one would be always trying to get
offending little officials discharged, and perhaps getting laughed at
for all reward. But he said no, I had the wrong idea: that there was no
occasion to get anybody discharged; that in fact you mustn't get anybody
discharged; that that would itself be a failure; no, one must reform the
man--reform him and make him useful where he was.
'Must one report the offender and then beg his superior not to discharge
him, but reprimand him and keep him?'
'No, that is not the idea; you don't report him at all, for then you
risk his bread and butter. You can act as if you are going to report