OF TIME AND THE RIVER. Thomas Wolfe
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a distinguished and mature, but also a very worldly, urbanity. His manner, even in the class-room, was never that of the scholar or the academician, but always that of the cultured man of the world, secure in his authority, touched by fine humour and fine understanding, able, knowing and assured. And one reason that he so impressed his students may have been that he made some of the most painful and difficult labours in the world seem delightfully easy.
For example, if there were to be a performance by a French club at the university of a French play, produced in the language of its birth, Professor Hatcher might speak to his class in his assured, yet casual and urbanely certain tones, as follows:
“I understand Le Cercle Français is putting on De Musset’s Il faut qu’une porte soit ouverte ou fermée on Thursday night. If you are doing nothing else, I think it might be very well worth your while to brush up on your French a bit and look in on it. It is, of course, a trifle and perhaps without great significance in the development of the modern theatre, but it is De Musset in rather good form and De Musset in good form is charming. So it might repay you to have a look at it.”
What was there in these simple words that could so impress and captivate these young people? The tone was quiet, pleasant and urbanely casual, the manner easy yet authoritative; what he said about the play was really true. But what was so seductive about it was the flattering unction which he laid so casually to their young souls — the easy off-hand suggestion that people “brush up on their French a bit” when most of them had no French at all to brush up on, that if they had “nothing else to do,” they might “look in” upon De Musset’s “charming trifle,” the easy familiarity with De Musset’s name and the casual assurance of the statement that it was “De Musset in rather good form.”
It was impossible for a group of young men, eager for sophistication and emulous of these airs of urbane worldliness, not to be impressed by them. As Professor Hatcher talked they too became easy, casual and urbane in their manners, they had a feeling of being delightfully at ease in the world and sure of themselves, the words “brush up on your French a bit” gave them a beautifully comfortable feeling that they would really be able to perform this remarkable accomplishment in an hour or two of elegant light labour. And when he spoke of the play as being “De Musset in rather good form” they nodded slightly with little understanding smiles as if De Musset and his various states of form were matters of the most familiar knowledge to them.
What was the effect, then, of this and other such-like talk upon these young men eager for fame and athirst for glory in the great art-world of the city and the theatre? It gave them, first of all, a delightful sense of being in the know about rare and precious things, of rubbing shoulders with great actors and actresses and other celebrated people, of being expert in all the subtlest processes of the theatre, of being travelled, urbane, sophisticated and assured.
When Professor Hatcher casually suggested that they might “brush up on their French a bit” before going to a performance of a French play, they felt like cosmopolites who were at home in all the great cities of the world. True, “their French had grown a little rusty”— it had been some time since they were last in Paris — a member of the French Academy, no doubt, might detect a few slight flaws in their pronunciation — but all that would arrange itself by a little light and easy “polishing”—“tout s’arrange, hein?” as we say upon the boulevards.
Again, Professor Hatcher’s pleasant and often delightfully gay anecdotes about the famous persons he had known and with whom he was on such familiar terms — told always casually, apropos of some topic of discussion, and never dragged in or laboured by pretence — “The last time I was in London, Pinero and I were having lunch together one day at the Savoy”— or “I was spending the week-end with Henry Arthur Jones”— or “It’s very curious you should mention that. You know, Barrie was saying the same thing to me the last time I saw him”— or —“Apropos of this discussion, I have a letter here from ‘Gene O’Neill which bears on that very point. Perhaps you would be interested in knowing what he has to say about it.”— All this, of course, was cakes and ale to these young people — it made them feel wonderfully near and intimate with all these celebrated people, and with the enchanted world of art and of the theatre in which they wished to cut a figure.
It gave them also a feeling of amused superiority at the posturings and antics of what, with a slight intonation of disdain, they called “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