212

his famous "Dictionary of Natural History:"

The cat is but a faithless domestic pet, one we keep only out of necessity, to keep down other household enemies even more annoying, and which we cannot otherwise get rid of; . . . true the cat, and still more the kitten, has pretty ways, it has at the same time an inborn love of mischief, a treacherous disposition, a natural perversity, which age only increases and training only succeeds in partially concealing.

Dumas was a judge of domestic pets, but he was five-sixths a dog lover and only one-sixth a cat lover. He had at one time at his country villa five dogs, one cat named Mysouff, a tame vulture, three monkeys, a blue and red parakeet, a green and yellow ditto, a golden pheasant named Lucullus, and a gamecock named Calsar. Of these he placed as facile princeps one of the dogs, Pritchard, "whose noble qualities and high breeding," he says, "well deserve this honor." It is true that Pritchard was once tried for killing a wild hare, but he was acquitted, since he brought the hare home unmangled for his master's dinner. On the other hand, Mysouff, brought to trial for torturing, murdering, and ruthlessly mangling the birds in Dumas's aviary, was condemned to imprisonment in the monkeys' cage on the ground of racial bad character, as set forth in the above-quoted opinion of Buffon, the famous naturalist.

But everybody knows that Dumas was an emotional person, and it may be said that he permitted his feelings to overrule his reason. Well, then, let us turn to the least emotional of all naturalists, Thoreau, who observed men and animals exactly as he did trees or potato vines. His works are published in twenty volumes. A careful examination of the index reveals forty references to dogs and only twenty-five to cats. That is to say, he estimates that in the scale of nature the importance of the dog is to the importance of the cat as 8 to 5. But Professor Phelps's ratio is dog: cat:: 2:3. Here is a mathematical disagreement which I think Professor Phelps is bound to explain to his readers and students.

But perhaps he will say that tastes cannot be measured by statistics, that the man who prefers strawberry jam to orange marmalade cannot be moved by the statement of the Agricultural Department that 5.376+ times as many tons of marmalade are consumed annually as of jam. Thoreau, however, is not always a mere statistical scientist. In his "Journal" he relates a canine. anecdote and says that it indicates that dogs in some respects are more civilized

The Outlook for October 19, 1927 than men, while cats "are so naturally stealthy, skulking, and creeping about, affecting holes and darkness, that they will enter a shed rather by some hole under the door-sill than go over the sill through the open door."

I will call two more literary witnesses and then rest my case. "Bobby" Burns was a dog lover or he could never have written "The Twa Dogs," in which Cæsar, the aristocratic Newfoundland, and Luath, the plowman's collie, discuss the frailties of mankind and "rejoic'd they were na men, but dogs." Nor could the poet who wrote so tenderly of the field mouse have been overfond of the ruthless feline enemy of that "wee, sieekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie."

Burns's great contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, is to be counted in the noble company of companions of the dog. His

staghound, Maida, is one of the most notable canines in literature, "the noblest dog," to use Scott's phrase, “ever seen on the Border since Johnny Armstrong's time." Maida was named for the battle of Maida in Italy, where the British beat the French in 1806 during the Napoleonic wars. The name, therefore, in spite of its feminine form, is not so inappropriate as it seems for a dog of fighting masculinity.

It must be said in the interest of truth that Scott had "a favorite cat;" but in extenuation of this favoritism I beg to point out that Scott made the admission in recognition of the misplaced passion of his friend Joanna Baillie, the Scottish dramatic poet. Writing to Miss Baillie, the author of "Waverly" said of Maida:

He is between the deer greyhound and mastiff, with a shaggy mane like a lion; he always sits beside me at dinner, his head as high as the back of my chair; yet it will gratify you [the italics are mine] to know that a favorite cat keeps him in the greatest possible order, and insists upon all rights of precedence, and scratches with impunity the nose of an animal who would make no bones of a wolf, and pulls down a red deer without fear or difficulty.

A tribute to the magnanimity of the dog under the guise of a compliment to the impudence of the cat!

Washington Irving visited Abbotsford in 1817, and in one of his essays gives this pleasant picture of Scott and his dogs:

As we sallied forth, every dog in the establishment turned out to attend us. There was the old staghound, Maida, that I have already mentioned, a noble animal, and Hamlet, the black greyhound, a wild, thoughtless youngster, not yet arrived at the years of

.

.

discretion; and Finette, a beautiful setter, with soft, silken hair, long pendant ears, and a mild eye, the parlor favorite. When in front of the house, we were joined by a superannuated greyhound, who came from the kitchen wagging his tail; and was cheered by Scott as an old friend and comrade. In our walks, he would frequently pause in conversation, to notice his dogs, and speak to them as if rational companions; and, indeed, there appears to be a vast deal of rationality in these faithful attendants upon man, derived from their close intimacy with him. Maida deported himself with a gravity becoming his age and size, and seemed to consider himself called upon to preserve a great deal of dignity and decorum in our society. As he jogged along a little distance ahead of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavor to tease him into a gambol. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of his young companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them, and tumble him in the dust, then giving a glance at us, as much as to say, "You see, gentlemen, I can't keep giving way to this nonsense," would resume his gravity, and jog on as before. Scott amused himself with these peculiarities. "I make no doubt," said he, "when Maida is alone with these young dogs, he throws gravity aside, and plays the boy as much as any of them; but he is ashamed to do so in our company, and seems to say-Ha' done with your nonsense, youngsters: what will the laird and that other gentleman think of me if I give way to such foolery?"

In this brief sketch I have referred to only a few of the champions of the dog. Can Professor Phelps furnish an equal list of writers or poets who are advocates of the cat? I fear not, for apparently most men of letters are like Haddad-BenAhab, the Arabian traveler: "He was kindly and good-natured to the whole human race; he even carried his benevolence to the inferior creation, and often patted his dogs on the head and gave them bones; but cats he could not abide. Had he been a rat, he could not have regarded them with more antipathy; and yet Haddad-Ben-Ahab was an excellent man, who smoked his chibouque with occasional cups of coffee and sherbet, interspersed with profound aphorisms on the condition of man, and conjectures on the delights of paradise."

It is a cheering thought to me that a man may be insensible to feline charms and yet be rated as excellent.

I

N his beautiful and sensitive book, "The Prophet," Kahlil Gibran, speaking of marriage, says:

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress

grow not in each other's shadow. Fantastically enough, he might have been speaking of the emotional basis of "The Shannons of Broadway," James Gleason's new play at the Martin Beck Theatre. Parenthetically, Gleason's play is badly named; for all the action takes place far from Broadway, in a small New England village hotel, and there are no songs by Fiske O'Hara in it. But otherwise it is a good show.

The Shannons themselves-Mickey and Emma, husband and wife are two vaudevillians, stranded in a one-nightstand town, who, refused lodgings, remain to buy the hotel, show their goodheartedness beneath their hard-boiled exterior, nearly lose all their savings and their marriage as well, but end up happily, foiling the local villain and generally playing Santa Claus to everybodyall in a cross-rough hand of melodrama and vaudeville glamour-the melodrama being the dummy, and vaudeville taking the tricks.

To sincere drama, "The Shannons" is about what an entertaining "Saturday Evening Post" story is to literature: something that can be recommended to nearly every one, provided too much is not expected.

66

A Review of the Theatre Saturday Evening Post" Night By FRANCIS RUFUS BELLAMY

fame, has done is to write a regular oldfashioned melodrama, "Way Down East," and introduce into it two vaudeville actors to make wise-cracks on the action as it progresses, and they themselves get mixed up in it. This melodrama is never real, but the wise-cracks are nearly always unfailing-which makes it amusing. The whole is saved from pure hokum (Mr. Theodore Kremer, meet Mr. E. F. Albee!) and wearisome repetition by the genuine portrayal of a real marriage between an actor and an actress who together are a loyal "team" and yet each of whom is always "himself."

It is this quality which carries "The Shannons" to success-without a single out of the ordinary mention of sex or marriage in the dialogue. It would be difficult indeed to secure a more moving moment in the theatre than the one in which Lucile Webster, the wife, forgiven by her husband for having, unknown to him, lost all their savings, turns to him with passionate emotion, and says to him: "How I love you, you poor, skinny little bum!"

This is the real emotion of the play, as contrasted with the emotion of the local melodrama of the village, which exists mainly so that the Shannons can play Santa Claus and Bobby Clark with it. To wit: the ingénue resolutely refuses the love of the juvenile-who is the son of the local rich villain, a realtor

And yet it has a touch of human reality beneath it, too.

At one dramatic point the father does this to the boy in a hotel lobby.

Whereupon admonishes Gleason: "Don't fall for that mother gag, boy. He'll be waving a flag at you next."

This is Gleason's rôle throughout, hard-boiled commentator; while Lucile Webster does the "big-hearted" act despite her vulgar language and rough exterior. The play nevertheless is quite continually funny, because Mr. Gleason has succeeded in making both rôles fairly credible, although sometimes too obviously done for a sophisticated audience which is asked to believe in Mrs. Shannon's genuine great-heartedness at the same time that that great-heartedness is portrayed with almost as much crudity as the melodrama at which the audience is plainly only meant to laugh.

Without further reinforcements perhaps these rôles would not stand. But there are others.

The most authentic thing in the play, after the delineation of the loyalty between husband and wife, is the convincing portrayal of the fascination and glamour of theatrical life from which the born actor can never escape.

Notably: To the hotel come the "Melody Boys"-four jazz saxophone artists, old friends on the "Big Time," with whom the Shannons played. The night clerk-another vaudeville actor out of a job who is working out his hotel bill, due to the Shannons' Shannons' kindness-stands glumly at the desk while they get out their instruments to surprise Emma Shannon, who is superintending the dining-room.

At the first few bars of the serenade out rushes Emma, wild with joy at the

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Harold Trowbridge Pulsifer, a story of singular beauty, is told with a quiet impressiveness suggestive of Hawthorne. In the once flourishing Maine port of Middlehaven Caleb Gurney, stone-mason, ship-builder, and maker of models, gave years of his life and all the passion of his soul to recreating in miniature "Glory o' the Dawn." It was not merely a ship model that he fashioned, but a symbol of past greatness. The splendor of those ships which once carried New England's fame through all the seven seas lived again in the moving beauty of the model.

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City

State.....

The Outlook for

Our Own Theatre List

Still With Us

"Saturday's Children," Booth Theatre.Young love struggling for individualistic happiness, without and within the bonds of matrimony. We would have given it the Pulitzer Prize.

"The Spider," Music Box.-Mystery melodrama with more surprises than any play on Broadway.

Done

with

"Broadway," Broadhurst.-Life back-stage in a Broadway cabaret. vim, rum, and pistols. "In Abraham's Bosom," Provincetown Playhouse. The Pulitzer Prize play. "The Road to Rome," Playhouse.-A slightly Rabelaisian take-off on history which might have been a great play if genuine emotion had been substituted for wisecracking. An amusing evening, as it is. New Faces

"Burlesque," Plymouth.-Back-stage drama in the small towns, with maternal emotion making a success of an otherwise ruined actor.

"Pickwick," Empire.-All right, if you like "Pickwick Papers." If not, use your own discretion.

"Trial of Mary Dugan," National.-Evidence turned inside out, in an expert and engrossing mystery murder trial.

Musical Shows

"Hit the Deck," Belasco.-Louise Groodyand a fast show.

"Peggy-Ann," Vanderbilt.-Demure, but not "Queen High."

"Good News," Chanin.-We haven't seen it, but our friends like it.

"The Mikado," Royale.-Our old friends Gilbert and Sullivan excellently represented. "The Merry Malones," Erlanger's.-George Cohan-and everybody dances. "Manhattan Mary," Apollo.-Ed Wynn. What more?

feels the pull. He seizes the penholder and in an instant is tapping the glass, ringing the bell, giving an imitation of

Vernon Castle at the traps; while the

memory of romantic nights behind the

footlights crowds into the imagination of the players, spreads across the footlights of the Martin Beck to the audience, and for an instant the glamourous, romantic thrill of the stage to the actor-the fascination and its endless dream-is abroad in the hearts of every one.

This is a heart-stirring moment—as moving as any poet's cry for the ocean or the lights of home to the returning traveler. Here are wanderers, minstrels, folks on a foreign shore. Here is nostalgia. So far as one could judge, the audience would have been content to listen to the Melody Boys for the rest of the evening.

Such things are pleasant moments in life. And "The Shannons of Broadway" is just that. Mickey and Emma aren't so, and you know it. The play is mostly theatrical tricks. But any one who likes good vaudeville would like it and most other people, too. When you come out of the theatre, the world pleases you a

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P

ELMANISM is a big, vital, signifi

cant contribution to the mental life of America. I have the deep conviction that it is going to strike at the very roots of individual failure, for I see in it a new power, a great driving force.

I first heard of Pelmanism while in England on war work. Sooner or later

almost every conversation touched on it, for the movement seemed to have the sweep of a religious conviction. Men and women of every class and circumstance were acclaiming it as a new departure in mental training that gave promise of ending that preventable inefficiency which acts as a brake on human progress. Even in France I did not escape the word, for thousands of officers and men were Pelmanizing in order to fit themselves for return to civil life.

When I learned that Pelmanism had been brought to America by Americans for Americans, I was among the first to enroll. My reasons were two: first, because I have always felt that every mind needed regular, systematic and scientific exercise, and, secondly, because I wanted to find out if Pelmanism was the thing that I could recommend to the hundreds who continually ask my advice in relation to their lives, problems and ambitions.

Failure is a sad word in any language, but it is peculiarly tragic in America, where institutions and resources join to put success within the reach of every in-dividual. In the twenty years that I have sat on the bench of the Juvenile Court of Denver, almost every variety of human failure has passed before me in melancholy procession. By failure I do not mean the merely criminal mistakes of the individual, but the faults of training that keep a life from full development and complete expression.

Pelmanism the Answer

It is to these needs and these lacks that Pelmanism comes as an answer. The "twelve little gray books" are a remarkable achievement. Not only do they contain the discoveries that science knows about the mind and its workings, but the treatment is so simple that the truths may be grasped by anyone of average education.

In plain words, what Pelmanism has done is to take psychology out of the college and put it into harness for the day's work. It lifts great, helpful truths out of the back water and plants them in the living stream.

As a matter of fact, Pelmanism ought to be the beginning of education instead of a remedy for its faults. First of all, it teaches the science of self-realization; it makes the student discover himself; it ac

JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY

Judge Ben B. Lindsey is known throughout the whole civilized world for his work in the Juvenile Court of Denver. He says,

"The human mind is not an automatic device. It will not 'take care of itself.' Will power, originality, decision, resourcefulness, imagination, initiative, courage-these things are not gifts but results. Every one of these qualities can be developed by effort, just as muscles can be developed by exercise."

quaints him with his sleeping powers and The shows him how to develop them. method is exercise, not of the haphazard sort, but a steady, increasing kind that brings each hidden power to full strength without strain or break.

Pelmanism's Large Return

The human mind is not an automatic device. It will not "take care of itself." Will power, originality, decision, resourcefulness, imagination, initiative, couragethese things are not gifts but results. Every one of these qualities can be developed by effort just as muscles can be developed by exercise. I do not mean by this that the individual can add to the brains that God gave him, but he can learn to make use of the brains that he has instead of letting them fall into flabbiness through disuse.

Other methods and systems that I have examined, while realizing the value of mental exercise, have made the mistake of limiting their efforts to the development of some single sense. What Pelmanism does is to consider the mind as a whole and treat it as a whole. It goes in for mental team play, training the mind as a unity.

Its big value, however, is the instructional note. Each lesson is accompanied by a work sheet that is really a progress sheet.

215

As Judge Lindsey has pointed

out, Pelmanism is neither an experiment nor a theory. For almost a quarter of a century, it has been showing men and women how to lead happy, successful, well rounded lives. 650,000 Pelmanists in every country on the globe are the guarantee of what Pelman training can do for you.

No matter what your own particular difficulties are poor memory, mind wandering, indecision, timidity, nervousness or lack of personality-Pelmanism will show you the way to correct and overcome them. And on the positive side, it will uncover and develop qualities which you never dreamed existed in you. It will be of direct, tangible value to you in your business and social life. In the files at the Pelman Institute of America are hundreds of letters from successful Pelmanists telling how they doubled, trebled and even quadrupled their salaries thanks to Pelman training.

I

N the old days of "Puck" there were a great many pictures, usually by Opper, of the actor parading the Rialto or Broadway. He wore a rusty tall hat, and a long overcoat with shabby astrakhan at the collar and cuffs. His face was gaunt and his chin not recently shaven, but he carried himself with a magnificent strut. This, because he had "once played with Booth." He was very contemptuous toward folk whom he called "low-down variety fakers."

If this person ever existed, he is practically extinct today. Opper's drawings were, of course, largely caricature, or at best he dealt with the ham actor who was himself something of a faker, like the leading character in Mr. Marc Connolly's recent play "The Wild Man of Borneo." The great and really successful actors have usually fought their way up from the humblest beginnings, and are sympathetic toward all their brother and sister entertainers, whether they paint their faces white and amuse circus audiences, shoot glass balls from horseback, or appear in charge of a troupe of trained seals. The famous star who has written one of the books mentioned here today would be the last person to object to a discussion, on the same page, of a book about the circus and another one describing the lives of variety actors in a cheap boarding-house. Indeed, Mr. Wallace Smith in "Are You Decent?" illustrates this exact point in the story about the great Shakespearean actor who chums readily and affectionately with his old fellow-troupers but is himself snubbed by the third-rate legitimate actor who declines his offer to appear in Shakespeare for the movies:

The circus might be classed, snobbishly, as the lowest form of the three kinds of entertainment represented in these books. Few of us nowadays make any such classification, or find it necessary to invent a small boy as an excuse for going to the big show. That the circus is a good subject for writers of books, whether fact or fiction, is perfectly well recognized. Jim Tully's "Circus Parade" is one of the best of these books; many readers would not qualify that statement at all. Its type was long ago described by some polished critic, like Andrew Lang, as "good although strong." I suspect that Mr. Tully and his more unrestrained admirers would feel some contempt for critics from Oxford like Andrew Lang,

but I cannot help thinking that "Circus Parade" would have been a better book if the rough stuff were not inserted in such lumps. The stories at their best are very, very good. Take "The Strong Woman"-the pitiful tragedy of one of the circus performers billed as "The Female Hercules." She weighed four hundred pounds and could wring the neck of the average man with ease. Her heart, however, was a mush of sentimentality and an easy prey for the rascal who swindled her out of her earnings by pretending that he was going to marry her. It is trite praise, but I hardly see how Maupassant could have improved this story; indeed, it recalls, in some way, his "Boule de Suif." In other stories Mr. Tully heaps on the brutality. "A Negro Girl" and "The Last Day" are powerful yarns; by over-emphasis the author failed to convince me that they are true as fact or as art.

Even at this late day, I should like to agree with the Committee for the Suppression of Irresponsible Censorship (although I am glad I do not have to make out checks to it) in its protest at the suppression of "Circus Parade" in Boston. Not that my heart aches for Mr. Tully, who knew well the risk he was taking when he wrote certain passages, and who has profited financially by the local suppression. But I am sorry for Boston with its sweeping literary censorship exercised by policemen.

The title of Mr. Smith's "Are You Decent?" is taken from the traditional formality of the world back-stage. It is the inquiry of the visitor who asks if the one inside is sufficiently clad to receive a caller. The stories are about life in Mrs. Fisher's boarding-house, which is "strictly for the profession." Many readers will instantly recall some earlier books (I said earlier, not better, Brutus) on this hilarious subject. They are "At the Actors' Boarding House" and "The Maison de Shine," by Helen Green. Mrs. Fisher's house was one in which the knife and ax thrower might be con

versing on serious topics in the parlor with the decayed actor who was faithful to the traditions of Irving and Barrett, while from below in the cellar came the fishy barks of Sawtelle's trained seals. There can hardly be anything better than the story of "The Snake's Wife"of course, you know that a Snake is a human contortionist. In this tale the great actor, Eric Doberman, returns from his triumphs in London as Hamlet to visit his old friends of simpler days. As he is described as a member of a famous family of actors, many readers will insist on identifying him with the latest American to play Hamlet in London. To the boarders at Mrs. Fisher's, however, he is still "Wormy" Doberman, as in the old days, and they explain his desertion of the variety stage by the fact that they supposed somebody had to be playing this "here Shakespeare."

The great tragedian makes an attempt to dance a shuffle to see if he has improved at all, while the expert, Eddie Dean, looks on and criticises.

"How am I, Eddie?" asked Dober

man.

"You're lousy," said the real hoofer. "If I wasn't," said Wormy, ruefully, "I wouldn't be playing Shakespeare."

Mr. Percy Hammond's "But-Is It Art?" is a collection of brief essays about the stage by the dramatic critic of the New York "Herald Tribune." Mr. Hammond cannot write a dull line and his sense of humor is nearly perfect. I would not miss reading what he has to say about a new play, and I would not think of following his advice without seeing what some of the more hopeful observers have thought of the show. If I followed Mr. Hammond slavishly, I should never go to the theatre at all, for he is profoundly depressed and cynical about the stage. His hatred of the whole business of the playhouse is as remarkable as the good nature and humor which never fails in his writing.

At last we come to the legitimate actor in Mr. Arliss's autobiography, "Up the Years from Bloomsbury." Looking at its chapters brings up the pleasant recollection that I have seen Mr. Arliss in "Old English," "The Green Goddess," "Poldikin," "Alexander Hamilton." "Disraeli," as well as some of his rôles when he was with Mrs. Fiske in "Becky Sharp" and "Rosmersholm." I missed him as the War Minister in "The Darling of the Gods," as "The Devil," and (Continued on page 221)