not only on the choice of what is kept when the superfluous has been jettisoned, but on the order in which these essentials are set forth. VI NOTHING but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected. The temptation to do so is all the greater because some critics, in their resentment of the dense and the prolix, have tended to overestimate the tenuous and the tight. Mérimée's tales are often cited as models of the conte; but they are rather the breathless summaries of longer tales than the bold foreshortening of an episode from which all the significance it has to give has been adroitly extracted. It is easy to be brief and sharply outlined if one does away with one or more dimensions; the real achievement, as certain tales of Flaubert's and Turgenev's, of Stevenson's and of Maupassant's show, is to suggest illimitable air within a narrow space. The stories of the German "romantic," Heinrich von Kleist, have likewise been praised for an extreme economy of material, but they should rather be held up as an awful warning against waste, for in their ingenious dovetailing of improbable incidents the only economy practised is that of leaving out all that would have enriched the subject, visually or emotionally. One, indeed, "The Marquise d'O." (thrift is carried so far that the characters are known merely by their initials), has in it the making of a good novel, not unlike Goethe's "Elective Affinities"; but reduced to the limits of a short story it offers a mere skeleton of its subject. The phrase "economy of material" suggests another danger to which the novelist and the writer of short stories are equally exposed. Such economy is, in both cases, nearly always to be advised in the multiplication of accidental happenings, minor episodes, surprises and contrarieties. Most beginners crowd into their work twice as much material of this sort as it needs. The reluctance to look deeply enough into a subject leads to the indolent habit of decorating its surface. I was once asked to read a manuscript on the eternal theme of a lovers' quarrel. The quarrelling pair made up, and the reasons for dispute and reconciliation were clearly inherent in their characters and situation; but the author, being new at the trade, felt obliged to cast about for an additional, a fortuitous, pretext for their reunion-so he sent them for a drive, made the horses run away, and caused the young man to save the young lady's life. This is a crude example of a frequent fault. Again and again the novelist passes by the real meaning of a situation simply for lack of letting it reveal all its potentialities instead of dashing this way and that in quest of fresh effects. If, when once drawn to a subject, he would let it grow slowly in his mind instead of hunting about for arbitrary combinations of circumstance, his tale would have the warm scent and flavour of a fruit ripened in the sun instead of the insipidity of one forced in a hothouse. There is a sense in which the writing of fiction may be compared to the administering of a fortune. Economy and expenditure must each bear a part in it, but they should never degenerate into parsimony or waste. True economy consists in the drawing out of one's subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation. It all comes back to a question of expense: expense of time, of patience, of study, of thought, of letting hundreds of stray experiences accumulate and group themselves in the memory, till suddenly one of the number emerges and throws its sharp light on the subject which solicits you. It has been often, and inaccurately, said that the mind of a creative artist is a mirror, and the work of art the reflection of life in it. The mirror, indeed, is the artist's mind, with all his experiences reflected in it; but the work of art, from the smallest to the greatest, should be something projected, not reflected, something on which his mirrored experiences, at the right conjunction of the stars, are to be turned for its full illumination. [Mrs. Wharton will write in a coming number on "The Novel."] BY J. FRANK DAVIS ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS HILDREN rushing out from school on Friday afternoon found standing at the schoolhouse gate a young man, gaudily dressed but somehow shabby notwithstanding his plug hat, who handed each one of them a little pasteboard bearing this intriguing legend: THIS TICKET AND TEN CENTS will ADMIT ONE SCHOOL CHILD ORIGINAL UNCLE TOM'S CABIN Saturday Afternoon, 2 p. m. GRAND STREET PARADE AT NOON. Shown to drama-disapproving parents, with sufficient teasing and emphasis on the moral, instructive, and educational argument, this ticket produced the necessary dime, and that Saturday afternoon became one marked in memory by a bright stone. Neither the school-child nor the conceding parent ever seemed to grasp the fact that ten cents without the ticket would buy admission just as well as with it. Throughout the northern part of the United States, in about 1880, were tens of thousands of good people of Puritan upbringing to whom the theatre and playacting were anathema. "The School for Scandal," no. "Romeo and Juliet," no. A minstrel show, oh, horrors! But "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was something altogether different. That was a moral les son. In America to-day are vast numbers of middle-aged men and women who remember that "Uncle Tom" was the first theatrical performance they ever saw. Also the second, third, and fourth, very likely, unless "Ten Nights in a Barroom" also happened to come to that town. I was one of those. Until I was thirteen years old I never saw a professional company of actors in anything but "Tom"but I had seen that sterling production five or six times. Each time with a new excitement, too, a thrill such as never will be known by the modern sophisticated infant who comes home from the feature picture to remark that Jackie Coogan wasn't half bad. No statistician has the figures of how many times "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has been played in America since its first performance in 1852. If they could be assembled, the result would be staggering. No play in the world, probably, has ever had half so many productions. Tom has appeared in the very biggest cities and the most gosh-awful tank towns. He has humbly but smugly remarked to Simon Legree that you may kill my body, mas'r, but you can't kill my soul, in the largest metropolitan theatres, the dinkiest kerosene-lit halls over the headquarters of volunteer fire-engine companies, and every kind of a show-tent that ever a weary crowd of troupers ranted in. In the patter of Dramatic Mirror and Clipper advertising they were U. T. C. Companies, but when actors spoke one to another they were Tom Shows. Right after the Civil War, and into the 70's, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a headliner of American drama. In the 80's it became the reliable stand-by of every company of "rep" barnstormers. It was still going strong out in the sticks in the 90's, and the Western tent shows had it until close to 1910 and perhaps later than that. Thus for more than fifty years it shrieked its improbabilities across the footlights. The childhood of two generations wept bitterly over Tom's wrongs and screamed with hysterical laughter at the impossible horse-play of Marks. I am not sure that I do not hold the amateur world's record as a Tom spectator, although in avoidance of controversy I'll claim only the New England title. I have seen at least a part of the show close to twenty-five times. Having been of the breed that in childhood was not allowed to see anything else theatrical, the various versions and improvisations that time developed came to have a fascination. I was ever curious to know what they would do to it next. Becoming, while still very young, a newspaper reporter with access gratis to theatres and, later, something of a specialist in dramatic reviewing, I had opportunity to see Tom Shows without paying for the privilege, and for as long as it lasted I made it my business to drop in upon every one that appeared on the horizon, for at least part of an act. If it was bad enough, I stayed through. I became, in a way of speaking, a Tom Show collector. In all that score and more of performances, I have never seen the same version twice. There seem to have been as many manuscripts of the play as there were early companies. In the later years of the show's life, there were no manuscripts. Tom actors knew every part in the piece according to one version or another, and usually according to many versions. They put the thing together, then, by word of mouth, according to the limitations of cast and scenery. At its very best, it was structurally a poor play. It had to be; there were so many diverse and rambling threads of plot to be followed. Early in the performance George Harris was the hero, and the heroine was his wife, Eliza. Presently George and Eliza vanished from the stage-to rush to their dressing-rooms and get ready to double as the New Orleans auctioneer and Marie St. Clare and Uncle Tom became the hero, with Eva St. Clare pressing him hard for stellar honors until her untimely and pathetic death, with slaves on their knees cluttering up the room and singing "I wonder where my Eva's gone." After this it was all Tom until Simon Legree, the dirty scoundrel, called him a black Methodist dog and beat a twelve-hundred-dollar piece of property to death. Everybody knows the story of how Harriet Beecher Stowe thought, when she wrote the book, that it would probably antagonize her abolitionist friends but that her Southern acquaintances would not find it unfriendly, because, of the three slaveholders who owned Tom, she made two kind and good and one cruel and bad, and of how surprised she was when the public promptly overlooked all the fine points of Arthur Shelby and Augustine St. Clare and concentrated its full attention upon the brutalities of Legree, so that his name became, in the Northern popular mind, the very synonym for slave-owner. But the shock of this surprise cannot have been as great as that which came to her if she ever, in her later years, witnessed what they did to her classic on the stage. No manuscript could have made the play altogether coherent short of five hours and fifty scenes. Few versions even tried to. Each, in an attempt to crowd as many incidents from the book as possible into the acted work, took outrageous liberties with the plot. Additional outrages were perpetrated to put comedy relief into scenes where comedy neither belonged nor fitted. It made a rare hash. Sometimes it was played in more than twenty scenes and sometimes in only six or seven. The less acts, the more disconnected became its odds and ends of plot. An auditor followed the thread of the thing only because he already knew it. Rarely the play began approximately where the novel began, with Tom being called from his cabin at night by Eliza Harris and told that he had been sold, together with her little boy, and that she, with the child, was going to attempt to escape across the Ohio. More often Tom didn't come into the piece at all until he appeared at the St. Clare home in New Orleans, along in the middle of the play. The show usually opened with a tavern scene in which George Harris, on his way toward the river, read on the wall the notice of a reward for his capture and, peeling off a kid glove, exhibited to a friend his branded hand, with a fine highfalutin speech in language such as few white men could have got off, let alone a runaway slave. Every other negro in the play except Eliza always spoke more or less in dialect, such as it was, but it was a Tom tradition that George Harris should talk like a highly educated Northern white person who had specialized in political orations. There was sound authority for this tradition; Mrs. Stowe had done it in the book. There were other traditions not so well grounded. Tom was always played with a white, or at least a grizzled, wig. If any negro of forty years or so in real life ever had gray hair, he was as freakish as an albino, but it got more tears to make him look old. The good master Shelby almost never appeared. St. Clare was made good enough, so far as he went, but he was a colorless person, a mere feeder for the fat lines of Tom, Eva, Topsy, and Miss Ophelia. And never, never have I heard it even intimated in the play that while Shelby and St. Clare, the two kind masters, were Southerners, the dastardly Simon Legree was a Yankee, born in New England. But then, few people who read the book ever grasped that point or, if they did, ever seemed to remember it. Eliza, who skipped across the floating ice with her baby, and who quite possibly doubled as Topsy in later scenes, was likely to be a flippant soubrette. Phineas Fletcher, the Quaker, was a low comedian. And Marks, the lawyer, a more prominent but even lower comedian, was a silly ass who spouted inanities, always, for some obscure reason, wore white leggings, and invariably, indoors and out, carried a fat umbrella. And of all the absurd hokum that ever passed for comedy on the American stage, the Tom Shows had the worst. Consider: "Can you inform me, sir, whether it is possible for me to secure any sort of a vehicle to take us to the next town?" asked George Harris, the escaped slave, of Phineas, the Quaker. "Friend George," replied Phineas in a high nasal whine, placing the ends of his fingers precisely together and rising slowly on his toes with the final two words of the speech. "I cannot say if thee can get a ve-hy-cle or any other kind of a ve-ho-cle, but I will be glad to carry thee thither in a carriage. Yea-a-a, veri-lie!" That one was good for a great laugh, which explains why, after some ham actor first tried it, it ever thereafter stayed in. And Fletcher had another sure-fire hit, in the later scene where Haley and Loker, the slave-dealers, accompanied by Marks, the lawyer, intercepted George, Eliza, and the baby, escorted by the Quaker, in a pass in the Ohio hills. "We're looking for a runaway nigger named Harris," Haley said, "belonging to Mr. Harris of Shelby County, Kentucky." "I am George Harris," orated that person, stepping forward with a Congressional gesture. "A Mr. Harris of Kentucky did call me his property. But now I'm a free man, standing on God's free soil, and my wife and child I claim as mine. I shall not surrender. Come, seize me at your peril. I have a pistol here, and I promise you I shall sell my life dearly." Consultation between the slave-dealers and Marks. Loud threats and bullyragging. Then came the Quaker's chance, as he stepped forward. "Pistol and bullets and firearms have I none," he chanted, "and fighting is unbecoming to a regenerated man-but if worse comes to worst, this right hand is sudden death and this left hand is six weeks in the hospital. Yea-a-a, veri-lie!" That doubled the audience up in its seats. When worse did come to worst, presently, and the gun-play began, they were still laughing. They laughed even harder when Marks, the cut-up, trying to hide behind a too small rock, opened his umbrella to protect himself from the flying bullets as Haley was shot, the Quaker knocked Loker down, and the curtain fell. However the different companies put the show together by acts and scenes, and however the cues and lines surprisingly assembled themselves to fit the altered situations, this scene in the mountain pass was never left out; this one and four others-Eliza's escape across the floating ice, Topsy's "Golly, I'se so wicked" confession (sometimes with song and dance interpolated right there in the St. Clare parlor), Eva's death-bed, and the killing of Uncle Tom. Legree always did that killing personally, and did it very easily and expeditiously. Tom lifted up his arms so as not to get hurt and Simon, with a snake |