OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ “the commercial producers”— the Shuberts, Belascos, and others of this kind. Thus, when Professor Hatcher told them how he had done some pioneer service in Boston for the Russian Players and had received a telegram from the Jewish producer in New York who was managing them, to this effect: “You are the real wonder boy”— they were instantly able to respond to the sudden Hatcherian chuckle with quiet laughter of their own.

      Again, he once came back from New York with an amusing story of a visit he had paid to the famous producer, David Belasco. And he described drolly how he had followed a barefoot, snaky-looking female, clad in a long batik gown, through seven Gothic chambers mystical with chimes and incense. And finally he told how he had been ushered into the presence of the great ecclesiastic who sat at the end of a cathedral-like room beneath windows of church glass, and how he was preceded all the time by Snaky Susie who swept low in obeisance as she approached, and said in a silky voice —“One is here to see you, Mahster,” and how she had been dismissed with Christ-like tone and movement of the hand —“Rise, Rose, and leave us now.” Professor Hatcher told this story with a quiet drollery that was irresistible, and was rewarded all along by their shouts of astounded laughter, and finally by their smiling and astonished faces, lifting disbelieving eyebrows at each other, saying, “Simply incredible! It doesn’t seem possible! . . . MARVELLOUS!”

      Finally, when Professor Hatcher talked to them of how a Russian actress used her hands, of rhythm, tempo, pause, and timing, of lighting, setting, and design, he gave them a language they could use with a feeling of authority and knowledge, even when authority and knowledge were lacking to them. It was a dangerous and often very trivial language — a kind of jargonese of art that was coming into use in the world of those days, and that seemed to be coincident with another jargonese — that of science —“psychology,” as they called it — which was also coming into its brief hour of idolatry at about the same period, and which bandied about its talk of “complexes,” “fixations,” “repressions,” “inhibitions,” and the like, upon the lips of any empty-headed little fool that came along.

      But although this jargon was perhaps innocuous enough when rattled off the rattling tongue of some ignorant boy or rattle-pated girl, it could be a very dangerous thing when uttered seriously by men who were trying to achieve the best, the rarest, and the highest life on earth — the life which may be won only by bitter toil and knowledge and stern living — the life of the artist.

      And the great danger of this glib and easy jargon of the arts was this: that instead of knowledge, the experience of hard work and patient living, they were given a formula for knowledge; a language that sounded very knowing, expert and assured, and yet that knew nothing, was experienced in nothing, was sure of nothing. It gave to people without talent and without sincerity of soul or integrity of purpose, with nothing, in fact, except a feeble incapacity for the shock and agony of life, and a desire to escape into a glamorous and unreal world of make-believe — a justification for their pitiable and base existence. It gave to people who had no power in themselves to create anything of merit or of beauty — people who were the true Philistines and enemies of art and of the artist’s living spirit — the language to talk with glib knowingness of things they knew nothing of — to prate of “settings,” “tempo,” “pace,” and “rhythm,” of “boldly stylized conventions,” and the wonderful way some actress “used her hands.” And in the end, it led to nothing but falseness and triviality, to the ghosts of passion, and the spectres of sincerity, to the shoddy appearances of conviction and belief in people who had no passion and sincerity, and who were convinced of nothing, believed in nothing, were just the disloyal apes of fashion and the arts.

      “I think you ought to go,” says one. “I really do. I really think you might be interested.”

      “Yes,” says number two, in a tone of fine, puzzled, eyebrow-lifting protest, “but I hear the play is pretty bad. The reviews were rather awful — they really were, you know.”

      “Oh, the play!” the other says, with a slight start of surprise, as if it never occurred to him that anyone might be interested in the play —“the play, the play IS rather terrible. But, my dear fellow, no one goes to see the PLAY . . . the play is nothing,” he dismisses it with a contemptuous gesture —“It’s the SETS!” he cries —“the SETS are really quite remarkable. You ought to go, old boy, just to see the SETS! They’re very good — they really are.”

      “H’m!” the other says, stroking his chin in an impressed manner. “Interesting! In that case, I shall go!”

      The SETS! The SETS! One should not go to see the play; the only thing that matters is the sets. And this is the theatre — the magic-maker and the world of dreams; and these the men that are to fashion for it — with their trivial ape’s talk about “sets.” Did anyone ever hear such damned stuff as this since time began?

      False, trivial, glib, dishonest, empty, without substance, lacking faith — is it any wonder that among Professor Hatcher’s young men few birds sang?

      xiii

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      That year the youth was twenty, it had been his first year in New England, and the winter had seemed very long. In the man-swarm he felt alone and lost, a desolate atom in the streets of life. That year he went to see his uncle many times.

      Sometimes he would find him in his dusty little cubicle, bent over the intricacy of a legal form, painfully and carefully, with compressed lips, filling in the blank spaces with his stiff, angular and laborious hand. Bascom would speak quietly, without looking up, as he came in: “Hello, my boy. Sit down, won’t you? I’ll be with you in a moment.” And for a time the silence would be broken only by the heavy rumble of Brill’s voice outside, by the minute scratching of his uncle’s pen, and by the immense and murmurous sound of time, which rose above the city, which caught up in the upper air all of the city’s million noises, and yet seemed remote, essential, imperturbable and everlasting — fixed and unchanging, no matter what men lived or died.

      Again, the boy would find his uncle staring straight before him, with his great hands folded in a bony arch, his powerful gaunt face composed in a rapt tranquillity of thought. At these times he seemed to have escaped from every particular and degrading thing in life — from the excess of absurd and eccentric speech and gesture, from all demeaning parsimonies, from niggling irascibilities, from everything that contorted his face and spirit away from its calmness and unity of thought. His face at such a time might well have been the mask of thought, the visage of contemplation. Sometimes he would not speak for several minutes, his mind seemed to brood upon the lip and edge of time, to be remote from every dusty moment of the earth.

      One day the boy went there and found him thus: after a few moments he lowered his great hands and, without turning toward his nephew, sat for some time in an attitude of quiet relaxation. At length he said:

      “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

      It was one of the first days of spring: the spring had come late, with a magical northern suddenness. It seemed to have burst out of the earth overnight, the air was lyrical and sang with it.

      Spring came that year like a triumph and like a prophecy — it sang and shifted like a moth of light before the youth, but he was sure that it would bring him a glory and fulfilment he had never known.

      His hunger and thirst had been immense: he was caught up for the first time in the midst of the Faustian web — there was no food that could feed him, no drink that could quench his thirst. Like an insatiate and maddened animal he roamed the streets, trying to draw up mercy from the cobble-stones, solace and wisdom from СКАЧАТЬ