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two violin sonatas, all have faded into the second rank of importance beside the work he is just now finishing — his electric opera, of which the so called "Cyclops" chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysses" forms the book.

"Ulysses", it must be pointed out, is largely an analogy to Homer's "Odyssey". The novel itself does not openly indicate this truth; but the critics and reviewers (with or without hints from Mr. Joyce) discovered it, and now the resemblance is plain to everybody. In the original Cyclops story, the one eyed Polyphemus, after being blinded by a burning stick, hurled a boulder after the ship of the fleeting Ulysses and his companions, but missed them. In the "Cyclops" chapter of the novel, Leopold Bloom, the modern Ulysses, gets into a barroom fight in Dublin and is pursued into the street by an irate Irishman who has picked up an empty biscuit tin to hurl at Bloom. Bloom grabs the tail end of a passing jaunting car and gets away. The Irishman throws the biscuit tin after him, but the setting sun dazzles him and he misses; the tin hits the pavement.

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Such being the story of the opera, it is evident that the music, in the hands of Mr. George. Antheil, winds up with a bang. But there are several other bangs in "Cyclops". The opera has music and it has words, but there its resemblance to other opera ceases. It is, for instance, to be performed - as much as it can be performed without human players at all, or at least visible ones. The "orchestra" is to consist of a battery of twelve electric pianos, eleven of them hooked up mechanically with the twelfth, which plays the master roll. Noting the rubber drums, the steel and wood xylophones and various blare instruments, all of which are to be played by

the master roll also, it must be mentioned that the score is to be run off at one swift tempo and at a level forte without any crescendos or diminuendos except as these effects are gained by switching pianos on or off. Each individual instrument, when it plays at all, plays at utmost speed and power.

No singers appear on the stage. They are concealed below, where they vocalize into receivers connected with loud speakers scattered through the auditorium. This device enables the voices to be heard above the din of the pianos and xylophones and also saves the audience the unpleasantness of having to gaze upon singers who do not in the least resemble characters whose rôles they are assuming. Instead of singers on the stage the Joyce-Antheil opera provides for a ballet interpreting in pantomime the action as it progresses. The responsibility for the ballet interpretation Mr. Joyce has taken upon himself, contributing full stage directions.

Do not think that this devastating opus has been born to die unsung. Even as these sentences are being written, a contract for "Cyclops" has been closed between the authors and the Provincetown Players of New York, who have guaranteed to give it an American production. "Cyclops" is on its way into the American operatic repertoire.

Almost on the pedestal with Joyce himself George Antheil places his closest friend, Ezra Pound. Ezra is easily the most eminent poet of the Latin Quarter writing in English or largely in English. Actually he follows the modern mode of interspersing English with oddments of foreign languages dead and alive, common and rare. Ezra will be coasting along easily in English, writing stuff that reads at least as if it ought to

be intelligible to a true intellectual, when suddenly he will roll in some such obstacle as "ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!" and the low grade intellect that has dashed headlong into the obstruction will pick itself up nursing a shanty on its mental eye.

A few bumps like this one, and a person begins to get the scheme of it. There are intelligences so keenly discriminating, so microscopically calibrated, that the tongues of all men are none too rich in words for the exact expression of their ideas. Any single language is too lean for the modern genius. Tobacco smoke, it is said, looks blue because its particles are so fine that they intercept only the short blue rays of light. In like manner do the tongues of men serve the muse of Ezra Pound and the other moderns. There are times, it seems, when only the Icelandic phrase, the Hindustani idiom, the Manchu ideograph, or some such thing, can capture the blue and ultraviolet wave lengths of the Poundian sunshine.

Ezra Pound is a sort of college professor type who has leaped the corral of conventionality and now ranges the literary open spaces. He follows up abstruse lines of original investigation, such as the higher mathematics of musical harmony, and bandies about such themes carelessly and casually like Olympian small talk. He is quizzical in manner and complexly humorous, is prone to answer one question by propounding another that seems simple but is actually a baffler, and has other mannerisms; in spite of which, however, the somewhat difficult Mr. Pound is a pleasant enough chap. He has a big shock of wind blown blond hair and a full blond beard roughly trimmed to a point. At work in his studio in the Rue Notre-Damedes-Champs, he often wears a blue

shirt with roll collar open at the throat, and also a black velvet coat. Sometimes he walks abroad in his velvet jacket, but then he dons a Latin Quarter hat. Only from the waist down does he wear the raiment of mortals who dwell not on Parnassus; otherwise he is completely and utterly the poet.

The Latin Quarter divides him with Italy, where he browses in old libraries among the mediæval manuscripts. His passion for the mediæval has led him into a study of music which has carried him so far that he is now as much musician as poet. He began by studying the verse of the old troubadours, but found it to be verse so wedded to music that he had to gain a mastery of this also. Then he began reconstructing troubadour music in modern form, and has brought out collections of troubadour songs which his researches unearthed in England and Italy.

In France his study of Villon's verse led to the creation of an opera called "The Testament", of which the book is the poetry of François Villon and the music by Ezra Pound music based on ancient forms. The mediævalists noted neither time schemes nor lengths of tones in their music scores - their performers understood these things instinctively but instinct, Mr. Pound discovered, would not come to the rescue of the modern musician. So he bowed to the inevitable and called in George Antheil as assistant; and while Ezra sang the score and tapped on his desk, George made the necessary time notations. The structure of mediæval music is such that the score of "The Testament" averages eight changes of time to every bar, or practically a special notation for every measure of it. It is unusual, it is difficult, but it is playable.

Nevertheless it is upon verse that

Mr. Pound's fame chiefly rests, and to verse that he devotes his chief attention. He is now revealing for the first time the vast plan of an epic which is to be his magnum opus. For ten years he has been working away at this poem, and he hopes to live to put thirty years more on it, thus making it a presentation of the modern consciousness as observed by Ezra Pound throughout his life. He has not yet named the epic, and he may never name it. The Three Mountains Press, which is bringing out the first cantos of it in an edition limited to ninety copies (ranging in price from twenty five to one hundred dollars a copy), is calling it merely 'Sixteen Cantos of Ezra Pound". Mr. Pound himself has thought of calling it "A Poem of Some Length".

In this first public offering of the epic the strongest sections relate to the deeds of one Sigismundo Malatesta, a mediæval general who hired his sword variously to Venice and Florence and spent his wages patronizing the arts in a temple which he built for himself at Rimini. There he surrounded himself with the best poets and painters and sculptors and in general acted as an agent of civilization, as Mr. Pound says, in an age peculiarly commercial and materialistic. The poem's record of Malatesta is as historically accurate as Mr. Pound's researches in the Vatican Library could make it, and the likeness of the age to our own gives the poet opportunity to criticize his own times when ostensibly talking about others.

The whole group of young intellectuals in Paris is curiously interknit. Ford Madox Ford writes about them all and publishes their contributions in his magazine. Ford's magazine has its publication office at Bird's printing shop. Bird publishes their books.

Pound is literary adviser for Bird's publishing house. McAlmon publishes some of their books and has some of his own published by Bird. Antheil and Joyce collaborate in an opera. Antheil collaborates with Pound in an opera. Antheil writes about the music of Pound, and Pound has written a book about the music of Antheil. Bird and Antheil have formed a business arrangement for the exploitation of Antheil's new system of musical notation. Sylvia Beach sells all their publications and makes her bookshop their headquarters. And they all sit at the feet and hear the word from James Joyce, author of "Ulysses".

Electric opera, mediæval opera, magazines of rebellion, poems "of some length" done in a hundred cantos and nearly as many languages, books printed for the intelligent three hundred, three-hundred-thousand-word novels largely without paragraphing or punctuation, novels not likely to be published "for legislative reasons"-is this a madhouse, or is it the van of English-language culture? Is it all pose, pretense, and insincerity; or will people a century hence be referring to Antheil as another Bach, Pound a modern Dante, Bird a second Caxton, and Joyce the rival of Shakespeare?

The truth probably lies between the extreme views. The young intellectuals are probably not nearly so futile as intolerant Philistine opinion might hold them, nor nearly so significant as they hold each other. The works of all of them do show talent, and their scorn of the rules does tend to shock more docile craftsmen out of their oiled ruts. Some of these things being done in Paris influence and may even change existing standards may blaze the way for new tendencies. And at least nobody can assert that the doings of the bookshop circle lack interest.

IN DEFENSE OF MELODRAMA

By Arthur Hobson Quinn

HERE is nothing easier than to

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give a play a bad name and hang it. How often, after an evening in which a playwright has entertained, surprised, and even thrilled us for a few moments, do we reward him by shamefacedly remarking to our semi-profound friends, "Oh, yes, it was an interesting play, but of course it was only a melodrama. When we go to see Miss Cowl as Juliet or Mr. Hampden as Cyrano and find that we have thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, we feel a glow of virtuous approval; when we assist Mrs. Fiske in reviving "The Rivals", we have a similar glow. Tragedy and comedy are respectable. But when we have sat with our eyes riveted on the stage while Mr. Gillette played with his deft fingers upon our emotions in the double rôle of playwright and actor in "Secret Service" or when Mr. Thomas's "The Witching Hour" treated with originality and power one approach to the uncharted country of the soul, we knew we were moved and we were a bit ashamed of it. Partly we were disturbed because these plays were American-how could they be great or even important? Are not we constantly told by those who are perhaps informed on other matters that we have produced no great plays in America?

But it is partly the critical rage for classification that besets us. We think we know tragedy and comedy, but we do not know what to do with the vast body of plays which lie between these species. We call them all melodrama, and into that convenient category we

see pitched such artistic opposites as "They Knew What They Wanted" and "Rain"; "Cobra" and "White Cargo"; "What Price Glory?" and "Seventh Heaven"; "Tarnish" and "The Easiest Way"; "Outward Bound" and "The Fool"—the list might go on.

Then perhaps the thought begins to dawn upon us that there is good melodrama and poor melodrama; that we believe in Tishy Tevis in "Tarnish" and in Tony and his bride Amy in "They Knew What They Wanted", and that we do not believe in Sadie Thompson in "Rain" at all, notwithstanding Miss Eagels's fine performance. And then we begin to look for the laws of melodrama-not the rules, for dramatic rules are made only to be broken, while dramatic laws persist in spite of the textbooks on technique, and are as clear to the historian of literature as they are apparently cloudy to the critic. If age is any criterion of respectability, the melodrama has been present in our dramatic literature for centuries. As I watched the last delightful production of "Romeo and Juliet", with the bustle of the fight and the happy inconsequence of the action, the thought came to me what a fine melodrama this is! One word of reasonable explanation at the right time-a bit of ordinary caution-and all would have ended happily. There is none of the tragic inevitability of "Hamlet", of "Macbeth", of "Francesca da Rimini", of "Beyond the Horizon". I remember so well Dr. Horace Howard Furness's saying to us after reading "Romeo and Juliet"

aloud, "This is no tragedy-they found they loved each other-whatever happened afterward was a detail." But he did not call it a comedy and he was right. It is a fine, a glorious melodrama.

We, the English speaking races, had the thing long before we ticketed it neatly. The French thought they invented it at the close of the eighteenth century. What they called the mélodrame developed out of the pantomime plus dialogue and the scène lyrique, a combination of spoken words and music. It was a necessary revolt against the rigidity of the French tragedy and an attempt to bring the drama into closer touch with the free theatres of the boulevards, which were not permitted to play the legitimate drama of the Théâtre Français. The mélodrame in France had its effect on the great romantic drama of the next century of Hugo and Dumas, but our interest lies in its contribution to the drama of our language. In France it developed its own rules, among which were the presence in each play of four essential characters: a villain, an unhappy but virtuous woman, a good man who protects her, and the comic character who helps him circumvent the villain.

We

can see these four characters still in many of our melodramas but we have long ago forgotten the rules. What we took from the French melodrama was a revival of the essential quality of our best melodrama of an earlier period, the quality of freedom.

The tragic spirit demands high seriousness, a strict adherence to the dramatic laws of cause and effect. It creates a character with which we are asked to sympathize, and then it destroys that character. If it is fine tragedy, like "Hamlet", we see the ruin coming step by step, and we go out of the theatre at the end feeling exalted by having wit

nessed the struggle of a great human soul against circumstances too bitter to be borne. If it is fine comedy, like Mr. Mitchell's "The New York Idea", we see just as searching a scrutiny into the hollow mockery of certain of our social pretenses, and we laugh at the characters for their hypocrisy.

But there are times when we wish neither to have our souls exalted nor our weaknesses exposed. We wish to have our attention caught, held, kept by interesting situations and capable dialogue, and we wish to have above all that element of suspense which is the heart and soul of melodrama. So we are willing to give the playwright freedom. He may play upon that profoundest impulse of our nature, the instinct of self preservation, and the hero or heroine may be in danger all the time. We have progressed beyond the point when we demand a happy ending-we were quite satisfied to have the hero go out into the ice storm in "Conscience" (for we were tired of him)—but we do want the ending to be "satisfactory". I quote the word from Bronson Howard, who could write good melodrama when he chose to do so, as in "Shenandoah". That is why "They Knew What They Wanted" has a "satisfactory" ending. We do not want Tony to be left alone and we do not want his bride, whatever her momentary impulse of passion for Joe may have led her to commit, to go away with that light o' love. For Mr. Howard, the playwright, Mr. Bennett, Miss Lord, and Mr. Anders, the actors, have made us sympathize with all three of the leading characters; furthermore, their very limitations make them unsuitable for tragedy. It was far different when their originals, Lanciotto and Paola and Francesca, played out their tragedy in Boker's great drama. These were lofty souls who could not go on with the stain of guilt upon them. But

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