The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 73/Prague Letter
PRAGUE LETTER
BY the time these lines are in print people in New York will probably be engaged in either praising or damning the two imported Czech plays, R. U. R., and The World We Live In. Firmin Gemier is to produce R. U. R. at the Vieux-Colombier in Paris this winter and the other play is to be put on at Nigel Playfair's new playhouse in London, the Regent Theatre.
If the Cezch invasion of Broadway is successful another Capek play may eventually find its way across the Atlantic. Karel Capek has just finished it; at the moment it is only in manuscript.
The Affair Macropolus is one of those happy coincidences that happen now and again in the world of making books and plays. The theme of the play is that of Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, the idea of prolonging human life. But there is no suspicion of plagiarism. Capek began his play a long time before he heard about the Shavian Metabiological Pentateuch. He is content to call his play merely a Comedy.
In the seventeenth century during the reign of Rudolf the Second, the protector of all alchemists, there lived in Prague a Greek physician, Macropolus, who discovered something that would make a person live for three hundred years. Rudolf refused to be experimented on, so Macropolus gave it to his lovely daughter, Helen. The scene moves forward to modern times. An action is taking place in court over the legal ownership of an estate. Helen appears to give evidence, and because she is able to relate private incidents over a hundred years old she is compelled, with the alternative of being called an impostor, to declare her real age. She discovers that the Macropolus document containing her father's secret, for which she has been searching, is in this very estate. But Helen has the fatal power of her namesake of Troy. She excites the passions of all the men around her. Baron Prus, the owner of the estate, gives her the document in return for a night of love in her arms (a woman with a past of three hundred years should be quite an interesting amoureuse). Janek, her son, on learning this, commits suicide. Even her many-times-removed great-grandson is not immune from her fascination. After a long philosophical discussion between the men about the value of the document, Helen offers it to the young girl, Christina, the lover of Janek; and because her lover is dead she takes it and without a word burns it slowly in the flame of a candle. Thus ends the idea of longevity. Shaw's play carries us as far as the Shavian mind can reach—the Vortex and the Whirlpool in Pure Intelligence. Capek's play leaves us imprisoned within our flesh—his mind can only reach out to the ideal of the Mother and Child. But it is a provocative and stimulating play and is sure to create some discussion when it is produced this winter.
Karel Capek is also the dramaturge of the Vinohrady Theatre. This theatre, the home of the intellectual drama in Prague, with an annual expenditure of four million crowns (one hundred thousand dollars) has just been able to obtain a fairly substantial subsidy from the municipality and the State to the tune of five hundred thousand crowns (about twelve thousand dollars). I mention this economic fact because it explains how a theatre with a box-office can dispense with that modern horror, the box-office play. The winter season repertoire ranges through the drama from Aristophanes right up to Knut Hamsun: on the way we meet the names of Racine, Molière, de Musset, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Byron, Goldoni, Goethe, Pushkin, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Björnson. Surely a sufficiently hearty meal for the most hardened. But the Czechs have the stomachs of peasants and the digestion of a horse.
I don't know whether you celebrated the Shelley Centenary in your country. In England a very unostentatious meeting took place at which the Italian Ambassador gave a speech in English and I believe that Sir Rennell Rodd spoke in the language of Dante (I may have got it all mixed). However it has been left to the Czechs to do the right thing. Without any great fuss they have produced his five-act poetic tragedy, The Cenci, a drama that has only been played once in England, and then only privately (as I write this, news comes from England that the Censor has just lifted the hundred-year ban).
Painting
Last May eleven young Czech painters held their first public exhibition. All of them with one or two exceptions are in their early twenties. The exhibition was retrospective, showing work done as far back as 1916. It was a little daring to reveal all the ugliness of early beginnings, but no doubt the result was justified. There on the walls was the actual development of each young artist for all the world to see. Feuerstein exhibited fourteen holiday studies of France, Spain, and the Pyrenees; all bright cubistic paintings bearing no special mark of individuality. It was a thousand pities that be did not show his beautiful stage designs for the National Theatre productions of Marlowe's Edward the Second and Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, which clearly showed the bent of his imagination and his joyous delight in colour. František Muzika showed a dozen paintings composed with the same formula of bright cheerful primary colours arranged on a dry harsh flat surface: in their primitive quality they reminded me very forcibly of some excellent scenes I have seen painted on the walls of a Buddhist temple in India. Some conventionally cubistic drawings were sent by Joseph Šima, now a student in Paris. The two most mature artists among this group are Ladislav Süss and Alois Wachsman. Süss is only twenty-two and full of Lebensfreudigkeit which shines through all his work. His landscapes were not all equally good, but when they did come off they expressed the direct vision of an artist sure of himself. There were two pictures that were as good as anything seen in London: an exceptional nude of a woman and a beautiful composition in blue, white, and grey of a young girl and pigeon. Wachsman, a young man studying architecture, has been through all the "isms" and exhibited thirty pictures representing his evolution from the age of nineteen when he was painting ugly portraits up to his latest phase which may be described as the New Classicism. Four pictures stand out in my memory: a Girls Bathing; a Virgin and Child; a Three Graces; a Venus; revealing a wonderful feeling for form. Wachsman seems to have left all the ugly tendencies of early youth behind him and has emerged into a direct expression of pure beauty. He is the most significant young artist from this group. Much of the other work was immature, but on the whole it was an interesting exhibition of young Czech tendencies.
New Groups
There are two groups of young literary people here in Czecho-Slovakia: "Devětsil" in Prague and the "Literary Group" of Brno (the Manchester of Czecho-Slovakia).
"Devětsil" (Nine Powers, or Colt's Foot, the early spring flower) is a Radical group orienting towards Moscow where Lunacharsky fathers the new Proletcult. This group is uncompromisingly Marxian, propagates the idea of Proletcult, and stands for Revolution. But youthful enthusiasm has so far evaded the domination of the dogma and there are one or two poets whose work is worth mention: Seifert and Černík. Although not the best of the group, Jiři Wolker represents a leavening influence. He is a typical example of what I like to call the "emerging peasant" bringing a smell of the soil into the coffee-house. He has published three small volumes of poems, The Guest in the House, Heavy Hours, The Highest Sacrifice, and two plays, The Hospital and The Grave. But there is not one among these proletarian poets so forceful, so bitter, and so dynamic as that young German poet and dramatist, Ernst Toller, who is now in prison for his share in the Munich Revolution.
The "Literary Group" publishes a monthly journal, Host (The Guest) and in their latest manifesto they attempt to steer a middle course between the purely proletarian and bourgeois art. Götze, the intellectual leader and critic of this group, has a book in the press, Anarchy in the New Czech Poetry.
Karel Vaněk, an ambitious young man, has established a literary journal, Kmen (The Trunk, of a tree) which is about the size of The Little Review. It is open to young writers and painters of any nationality. He would be glad to receive any American work (I do not know if there is any payment attached); address Karel Vaněk, 42 Palackehe Nábřeži, Prague.
The ignorance of contemporary American work here is almost criminal; and some of those poets who go tramping in the Rockies might do worse than make a journey in this direction; even if they have to blow their own trumpets and pay for their suppers by reciting their own poetry.
The Czech cultural life is helped by the comparative stability of the Czech economic conditions (how long these will last I cannot say) but at present the fact remains that the people have plenty of money to buy books and pictures, and to patronize the theatres and concerts, while a few hours away poor cultured Vienna is dying.