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Page 53
The commission administering the public library and employing experts
to operate it in all its departments and fields of activity has for many
years accomplished and continued its civic work not merely adequately
and thoroughly, but with superiority and distinction. This originally
self-appointed group of citizens was fired with the desire not to do
an exclusive or sectional work but to put upon its feet for the whole
municipality a civic institution. It proceeded toward this goal by
so shaping the undertaking that the city should ultimately accept and
assume charge of it as its own.
All the facts of experience we have go to prove that this public library
method of providing the shortest cut efficiently to give the public
proper free access to the world of books, is the method providing the
shortest cut efficiently to give the public proper cheap access to the
world of drama. By this method financial support for a theater may be
attained that shall be pledged to the civic good and adapted to local
dramatic requirements and development. This method of administration
by a special commission is not alone a proven feasible and simple civic
method, but also the only effective way yet broached to secure the
dramatic life and growth of a community.
Political corruption is no more to be accepted as a good argument to put
us off from the most feasible approach to the end needed than for the
public library itself. There may or might be some political corruption
in the administration of a public library. Are we, therefore, to give
up the library in our cities? There may be political corruption in the
administration of our public schools. Was it, therefore, a mistake
to establish them? Are we, therefore, to give up the public school?
Clearly, no! We are to strengthen and safe-guard them to the utmost.
One thing besides has been sufficiently exemplified by recent facts. It
is that the easy substitute for a civic theater commonly called in the
newspapers 'A Rich Man's Theater' will not represent nor attract the
community.
Under phenomenally affluent conditions for commanding good results, that
substitute has proved its futility with brilliant conspicuousness. Any
one may now see that it was fore-doomed to fail. Why? Because it was out
of touch with the people, fated to be sectional and temporary, in its
attempts and achievements.
Such failure shows what historic life confirms, that more efficient than
money support is the support of a unified civic life and of such genius
and talent as require to be fed by that life, and do not flourish on
cash alone any more than they do on no cash at all. In order to secure
good conditions for artistic fertility in place of artistic futility,
all these encouraging factors, in their just degree, require to be taken
into the account.
An academic theater would, I believe, prove equally futile. All such
substitutes for a civic theater are doomed to barrenness because of
their segregation from the life of the community. Historic facts bear
witness alike to the bloodlessness of the exclusive and the sensualizing
of the commercial elements, when either gain the upper hand in control
of the dramatic output. Under the auspices of neither will the great
leavening middle mass of our people be put in touch with the stage to
the mutual advantage of the community and the drama.
* * * * *
THE PLAY READER
BY HELEN A. CLARKE
I
We are told by many critics that Euripides is not so great as �schylus
or Sophocles, yet he seems to be on the whole the most beloved of the
Greek dramatists. As Porson said of him, 'We approve Sophocles more than
Euripides, but we love Euripides more than Sophocles.'
There are two reasons why he has been loved. First, among his countrymen
and the rest of the world, because, as a master of pathos, he has no
equal among the dramatists of his nation, and, as some declare, no
superior in the literature of the world. Second, by the moderns,
especially the English, because they see in him the promise of the
future. He is now regarded as anticipating in many ways the Elizabethan
drama. Churton Collins has well said, 'But in nothing does he come so
nearly home to the modern world as in his studies and presentation of
women. In Shakespeare and in Shakespeare alone have we a gallery of
female portraits comparable in range and elaboration to what he has left
us. He has painted them under almost all conditions which can elicit and
develop the expression of natural character: under the infatuation of
illicit and consuming passion at war with the better self, as in Ph�dra;
under the provocation of such wrongs and outrages as transform Medea
into a tigress and Hecuba into a fiend; under all the appeals to
their proper heroism, the spirit of self-sacrifice and self-abnegating
devotion, as in Macaria, Polyxena, Iphigenia, and Alcestis.'
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