more so than in comparison with a quite good act, that of Gallagher and Shean, which is enormously popular without having a single moment of that unobtrusive and absolute rightness which informs all of Mr Rogers' doings.
All of these matters take us far from the American girl whom Mr Ziegfeld in his quaint way thinks he is glorifying. In effect he does well by the number he gathers on the stage, giving them a first-act curtain all to themselves and a grand finale in which all the principals are actually secondary. Some of the girls seen from just the right distance (H) seem little in need of glorification.
What Mr Ziegfeld glorifies is the American habit of doing things slickly and smoothly and as well as possible: a habit largely extended to motor cars, transcontinental travel, Statler hotels, news reels, fountain pens, and other tertiary things, and excessively lacking in human relations and in the arts. The Follies comes, I think, chiefly under human relations. It pleases many tastes, and its success, if I am to judge by my own experience, is due to one thing: that the portions which do not please do not disgust. The set pieces almost always bore me by pretending to add something to the mere display (mere, indeed!) of what Mr Ziegfeld probably calls American girlhood; the intrusion of classic or aesthetic dancing always chills me. I pass them as not my affair, because from year to year I have found that you can look at them without pain.
It is given out that Mr Augustus Thomas has been made the "dictator" of the American stage; in fact he heads the Producing Managers' Association. The rage for dictatorship will unquestionably be set down by pacifists as the introversion of the German virus which our war supposedly destroyed. Baseball and the moving pictures have their dictators; in the popular mind, at least, no public institution can be complete without one. Day by day, in every way, we're getting dummer and dummer.
