Winifred Kirkland. 
 
 Ln 
 
 The Outlook,Dec.31,1919. 
 
 
 
 
 
THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 THE COLLECTION OF 
 NORTH CAROLINIANA 
 ENDOWED BY 
 JOHN SPRUNT HILL 
 CLASS OF 1889 
 
 ee 5 
 
 K Sam 
 
 To 
 
 FOR USE ONLY IN 
 
 THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION 
 
 Form No. A-368, Rev. 8/95 
 
 
 
(VY (es 
 
 - MOUNTAIN MUSIC 
 
 BY. WINIFRED KIRKLAND 
 
 ern highlands I catch myself listen- 
 
 ing to the stillness. New England 
 woods can be genuinely silent, but these 
 long black coves, these crests that turn sap- 
 phire and green and amethyst, these amber 
 thickets of giant rhododendron—these are 
 always palpitant with elfin undertones that 
 match their elfin colors. The southern Ap- 
 palachians are not like other mountains— 
 they are haunted. Always the secrecy and 
 romance of some elusive melody teases to be 
 interpreted. 
 
 I well remember my first impression of 
 mountain music. The young people of the 
 farmhouse were giving a party. We were 
 too travel-worn to attend, but from an up- 
 per window we watched. At first we won- 
 dered where the guests would come from, 
 for no neighboring houses were to be seen, 
 only the splendid solitude of Craggy bulk- 
 ing high upon the western horizon, but as 
 dusk drew in and stars came pricking out 
 above the towering peak other sounds than 
 the itinerant chime of the wood thrush 
 
 Oe nd ever again in these South- 
 
 _ broke through the pregnant forest quiet. 
 
 There were plashing of horses down at the 
 ford, the ring of hoofs on wet and slippery 
 rocks, and then everywhere about us 
 rhododendron thicket and spruce recesses 
 became alive with voices subdued but 
 merry—the laugh of a girl, the gibe of a 
 boy as he jolted some unsteady footlog. 
 Presently the cleared lawn beneath the 
 
 tree shadows was tremulous with young 
 _ forms shifty in the moonlight and moving 
 
 to the march of old games. Yet it is not 
 the sight but the sound that remains with 
 me. In the great branches of pine and 
 chestnut the katydids were deafening, but 
 below on the lawn the voices of boys and 
 girls were always soft, melodious ; never a 
 raucous shout, never a shrill giggle. Man- 
 ners preserved an old-world decorum here 
 in the heart of the woods. Musical as a 
 chant young throats sang: 
 
 * Jolly is the miller who lives by the mill, 
 
 The wheel goes round with a right good will, 
 
 One hand in the hopper and one in the sack— 
 
 Girls step forward and boys step back.” 
 
 Idyllic as some ditty of Arcady is my 
 first recollection of mountain music, and 
 yet even then there was present to my ear 
 something no stranger could ever fully 
 fathom. On the next night of my sojourn 
 my sleep was startled by sounds of savage 
 contrast to that first evening. On the road 
 leading past the little lumber settlement a 
 quarter of a mile away mad hoofs were 
 galloping to and fro, falsetto shouts rang 
 sinister, and pistol shots cracked sharp 
 upon the stillness, and these shrilling 
 drunken boys were the same slim brown 
 youths who had attended the party, whose 
 rich baritones had blended with the purl- 
 ing pleasantness of the mountain brooks. 
 Fast enough the mountains can change 
 that pleasantness of little streams to the 
 snarl of a perilous torrent, and fast enough 
 a smiling boy face can blacken, his voice 
 grow taut with curses, and the death doom 
 of his ready gun snap through the silence. 
 
 Here in the woods human and animal 
 sounds are subtly interfused. Mountain 
 people can talk the language of beast and 
 bird, treacherously enough sometimes, as 
 when some woman or small boy squats hid- 
 den in the bracken and answers the liquid 
 “ bob-white ” of the quail by the female’s 
 responsive love-cry, the low-whistled 
 “ whoo-oo0-y, whoo-y.” Nearer and _ nearer 
 comes the confident “beb-white,” although 
 
 the bird itself remains to the end eautious 
 and concealed until the last whispered 
 “whoo-y” brings him to the view of a 
 sure rifle. 
 
 I sometimes wonder where cattle calls 
 come from, syllables~sedulously handed 
 down from one generation to the next. 
 When the sheep come scuttling and scur- 
 rying with sharp, hurried bleatings across 
 a pasture sown with boulders gray and 
 shaggy as themselves, the ery that brings 
 them to the salting is “ sheep-i-nan, sheep-i- 
 nan.” When the cow bells are near at hand, 
 their incessant clamor subdued by enfold- 
 ing tree and bush, there is no need of call- 
 ing the cows home, but when these are slow 
 in returning from pasturage in the long 
 gold twilight, then the cattle call of the 
 mountains is a cry long to be remembered. 
 Some mountain woman, standing by the 
 bars, suddenly straightens and_ breathes 
 deep, then utters a rich yodel that rings 
 and echoes far and far up the black- 
 recessed coves where who knows what mys- 
 terious evening herdsmen hold the cows. 
 Patient, far-reaching, musical, it summons 
 until the far bells reluctantly tinkle, and 
 slowly come nearer and nearer; presently 
 dusky horns and lumbering flanks emerge 
 
 from deep forest gloom. While the cows. 
 
 shamble down to the home gate, from out 
 the haunted ravine rings the sweet bell- 
 note of the wood thrush, chiming on and 
 on, at recurrent intervals, until full dark- 
 ness possesses the forest, when another 
 bird begins, and the pathos of the whip- 
 poorwill issues from the wood like the 
 swish of an elfin flail. 
 
 Animal life looms large in any impres- 
 sion of the mountains—animal life wild 
 enough to haunt a remote climb with the 
 padded stealth of a bear or the crackle of 
 a rattler, and arimal life tamed and ser- 
 viceable, like that of the great lumber 
 oxen. Down from the sawmill that chugs 
 and shrills all day from a near-by gorge 
 they trundle at sunset. I hear the clink- 
 ing of chains before I see the sheen of 
 black flanks and hear far off that most 
 memorable of all mountain music, the sing- 
 ing of the lumbermen—rich male voices, 
 always hard to locate because they echo so 
 strangely sweet from the heart of rhodo- 
 dendron thicket or become muffled by the 
 roar of a stream. Down past the house 
 move the oxen with jingle of chains and 
 pause to drink at the ford, a pool of pale 
 gold framed by black green. 
 
 The noisy portable sawmill, briefly in- 
 trusive upon one ravine after another, 
 makes little permanent effect upon the high 
 dignity of mountain stillness. The place of 
 its invasion where it has straddled some 
 cataract is quickly obliterated by the 
 stealthy green hands of fern and laurel, 
 and its impertinent puffings and its scream- 
 ing saws are subdued by the multitudinous 
 murmur of the solitude. All human ac- 
 tivity, all human personality, is merged 
 into thag incessant low murmuring of the 
 woods. No wonder that mountain people 
 learn to slip noiselessly along the trails, or 
 that forms shy as fauns sometimes startle 
 me, looking out from leafy frame, with 
 watchful wildwood eyes. People here know 
 how to hide away their cabin homes as bird 
 and squirrel hide their nests. Ihave heard 
 the tired wail of a child from some secret 
 doorway, and have wondered if the croon- 
 ing heart of the mountains holds comfort- 
 ing for little ones helpless before the ca- 
 price of some moody mountain mother. 
 
 Unthinkably remote as is this mountain 
 life from all modernity, I once heard the 
 melody of the highlands and the clatter of 
 the vaudeville stage contend side by side 
 for audience. The occasion was called an 
 ice-cream festival, but the mildness with 
 which one associates those words was not 
 present here. As I sat ow the dark porch 
 of the host’s shack, I looked through the 
 lighted window, where on the bureau-top 
 just inside lay a great murderous Colt. 
 With darkling reference to its efficiency, 
 the young mountaineer in charge of cere- 
 monies announced that he didn’t reckon to 
 have no trouble around there that evening. 
 The warning and the pistol supplied that 
 sinister under-note always haunting the 
 subdued decorum of mountain gatherings. 
 Dusky tables were lighted by smoky lamps, 
 and always silently some girl would be led 
 away by some long, lithe youth to a seat at 
 that shadowy board—crude enough act, 
 which yet there beneath the high dim crest 
 of Craggy against the stars had all the 
 dignity of romance. 
 
 It was here on the porch that the two 
 types of music competed; the old and 
 beautiful, the new and tawdry. By all 
 promptings of setting and of mood, the 
 young people should have danced, but they 
 dared not dance; church laws, the only | 
 genuine laws of the mountains, forbade 
 dancing. Such strictness is an innovation 
 on freer, older practice, and it was a 
 tragedy for the old fiddler, who had given 
 his life to making hearts and feet light 
 for dancing. His white beard swept the 
 strings, his eyes burned in appeal, and he 
 fiddled with a mirth and music to make 
 the heart break because he could win no 
 response. Young feet stirred restlessly as 
 they were entreated by the very gladness 
 of the redbird’s whistle, by the woven 
 
 maze of fireflies in the pine, by the leaping 
 flame of azalea against some black recess, 
 
 but no one danced while the old man 
 played his soul into the strings. Then in 
 upon the elfin magic of his fiddle broke 
 the ugly metallic discord of a phonograph 
 set going for the evening’s entertainment. 
 It poured forth its vaudeville guffaws, its 
 nasal vaudeville eatches, its music-hall 
 jokes. Valiantly for a while the old mu- 
 sician contended against an interruption so 
 alien that he could not believe it would 
 prevail. Yet it did, and slowly his brave 
 old bow grew faint and its jocund wiz- 
 ardry died away, while the shining dance- 
 lights in his eyes dimmed to a puzzled 
 despair. 
 
 Yet how soon on that evening one for- 
 got the phonograph! All alien vulgarity 
 the mountains have power to subdue, in- 
 exorably secret. No wonder that mountain 
 folk are given to long silences when they 
 seem to be listening to the murmur of the 
 woods rather than to the pettiness of 
 neighborly chat. No wonder they translate 
 that occult undertone into all manner of 
 strange superstitions, propitiative to strong 
 presences surmised. When the great winds 
 come roaring down from the Balsam Gap, 
 who shall interpret the summons of their 
 trumpets? And who shall ever forget the 
 sound of mountain rain? Its insistent 
 downpour beats upon the brain as if that 
 were but a drum that might be broken to 
 serve some great thunder motif of the 
 orchestra. Blare of the great wind, stealthy 
 rustle of the fern, incessant roar of tum- 
 bling brooks, beat, beat, beat of rain, in 
 their deep diapason, all petty human voices, 
 and all cries of beasts that perish, all 
 sweetest fluting of all redbirds, all are 
 fused and forgotten. 
 
 Asheville, North Carolina. 
 593 
 
THE BOOK TABLE: DEVOTED TO BOOKS AND THEIR MAKERS 
 
 SPANISH DRAMATISTS OF TO-DAY’ 
 
 BY ALEXANDER GREEN 
 
 tion is to label plays according to con- 
 
 venient types and periods is obliged 
 to confess his impotence when he enters the 
 uncharted sea of the present-day drama. 
 This is the age of revolt, the period of ex- 
 perimentation with new ideas and new 
 prejudices and new forms to clothe them. 
 
 So well have the contemporary Spanish 
 dramatists followed the varying tenden- 
 cies and changing methods of the time that 
 there is no one definition of the past that 
 could include the acknowledged master- 
 pieces from José Echegaray down to Bena- 
 vente. 
 
 There is one bond of type, howeyer, that 
 connects them all and sets them apart 
 from the other dramatists of Europe and 
 America; namely, the peculiarly Spanish 
 atmosphere of their productions. Ibsen, 
 with all his Scandinavian setting and 
 Northern philosophy, remains a true cos- 
 mopolitan. Tchekoff’s dramas of abstract 
 character, for all their brooding Slavic 
 atmosphere, hold out a strong appeal to all 
 who appreciate the passing spectacle of 
 humanity. The fact that Professor Lewi- 
 sohn in his “ Modern Drama” (1915) de- 
 votes no space whatever to the Spanish 
 stage ; that Barrett H. Clark in his “ Con- 
 tinental Drama” (1915) discusses onl 
 Echegaray and Pérez Galdés; and that it 
 has been practically only since 1915 that 
 English translations have appeared of the 
 other great Spanish dramatists, reveals a 
 probable fear on the part of the translators 
 that the characteristics peculiar to the 
 Spanish drama would not appeal to the 
 average American reader. 
 
 And there is some reason for this appre- 
 hension. Spain is in many respects still 
 the land of old-fashioned romance, remi- 
 niscent of the days of Lope and Calderoén. 
 Headed to-day toward progress and social 
 evolution, she has not yet succeeded in as- 
 suring the triumph of new ideas that in 
 other countries are no longer questioned. 
 Political and social equality in Spain are 
 still mere desiderata. Ecclesiastical domi- 
 nation in politics is still a living problem 
 which Pérez Galdés finds it necessary to 
 challenge. The bull-ring is still popular 
 enough to furnish Blasco Ibafiez, the social 
 doctrinaire, with the weapons of antago- 
 nistic propaganda. An aristocracy exists 
 for the lashing mockery of Benavente, the 
 Shaw of Spain. 
 
 The modern Spanish theater begins with 
 Echegaray and culminates in Benavente. 
 The former, in his earlier years aromanticist 
 on the order of Hugo, was the first modern 
 to wean the Spanish theater from its trans- 
 Pyrenaic influences. Between Echegara 
 and Benavente stands Pérez Galdés, the 
 greatest literary genius of modern Spain, 
 who has combined his réle of powerful 
 novelist with that of an inspired play- 
 wright. ‘The younger group of dramatists, 
 whose rise aptly coincides with the new 
 Spain that was born of the rude political 
 awakening of 1898, appeared under the 
 leadership of these three men. 
 
 Le historian of the drama whose func- 
 
 
 
 1Contemporary Dramatists. Plays by Pérez 
 Galdés, Linares Rivas, Marquina, Zamacois, Di- 
 eenta, and the Alvarez Quinteros. Translated by 
 Charles Alfred Turrell. Richard G. Badger, Bos- 
 ton. 
 
 Plays by Jacinto Benavente. First and Second 
 
 ries. ‘Translated by John Garrett Underhill. 
 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. 
 
 694 
 
 Joaquin Dicenta, Eduardo Marquina, 
 Linares Rivas, Eduardo Zamacois (whose 
 representative plays Professor ‘Turrell has 
 for the first time made accessible in excel- 
 lent English rendering), the Alvarez Quin- 
 teros, and Martinez Sierra compose the 
 new generation that has altogether out- 
 grown the romantic theater of heroic sen- 
 timent and tedious declamation, and has 
 evolved almost to the point of a “school” 
 another marked feature of the present 
 Spanish stage. This is the realistic drama 
 
 of individual life, a picture of elemental - 
 
 forces pitted against social conventions. 
 With exceptions, much of the Spanish 
 
 
 
 JACINTO BENAVENTE 
 
 The Spanish dramatist whose plays have been 
 translated into English by John Garrett Underhill 
 
 stage of to-day consists of “ speaking tab- 
 leaux” of shrewd psychological observa- 
 tions made within the range of the average 
 person’s life and experiences. 
 
 Judged by present-day standards, even 
 Echegaray, with his often interminable 
 rhetoric and melodramatic effects so remi- 
 niscent of Scribe and Sardou, belongs 
 properly to a former generation. At his 
 best in “ El gran Galeoto” (of which an 
 English performance was given in Boston 
 as early as 1900), he has already become a 
 classic, like Calderén and Ibsen and the 
 Shakespeare to whom his enthusiastic 
 audience compared him on the oceasion of 
 the premiere of his “ Madman or Saint.” 
 His return in 1905 to active politics was 
 interpreted by competent observers as an 
 ability on his part to read and to under- 
 stand the signs of the times. 
 
 An intense and unflagging sympathy 
 with ideas of reform ‘and progress has 
 kept Benito Pérez Galddés, the famous 
 author of more than fifty novels, right up 
 to the forefront of the modern drama. For 
 sheer constancy of purpése in social and 
 pelitical propaganda he is excelled only by 
 the more radical Blasco Ibdiiez of the ante- 
 bellum days. The greatest triumph of his 
 life, “ Electra,’ which gives an incisive 
 portrait of the conflict between conserva- 
 tism and modern thought, drew upon itself 
 the fiery indignation of the Clerical party, 
 
 P3443 
 
 but also the sincere homage of the people. 
 Vigorous realism and_ practical common 
 sense distinguish also his “ Grandfather,” | 
 wherein another of the old Castilian tra-_ 
 ditions—family pride—receives condign 
 treatment. With the approach of old age 
 —he was born in 1845—Pérez Galdés has 
 become a Socialist in the sense of being a 
 broad-visioned social reformer. 
 
 His “ Celia in the Slums,” written in the 
 second year of the World War, thus 
 preaches an improvement of economic 
 conditions. A still later play, “ Solomon 
 the Rogue,” reveals the fact that the author 
 hopes to see the great social change real- 
 ized in the natural course of work, thrift, 
 and orderly evolution. 
 
 Jacinto Benavente is the exact antithesis 
 of Pérez Galdés. In his dramas he is never 
 a propagandist and but rarely a partisan. 
 On the contrary, he is a dilettante, and, like 
 Anatole France, interested in everything 
 and disturbed at nothing. He has no thesis 
 to prove, no problem to solve, and no rem- 
 edy to offer. The feminine heart, the frivo- 
 lous philanderer, royalty and the moneyed 
 class, misjudged charity and bourgeois 
 morality, and the hundred and one come- 
 dies and tragedies of daily life, are just 
 spoils for the author’s keenness of obser- 
 vation and his genuis for irony. A true 
 pedagogue, he teaches by laughter. Wit- 
 ness his masterpiece, “'The Bonds of In- — 
 terest,” that profound comedy of masks 
 recently produced in New York, in which 
 between smiles and guffaws we soberly 
 recognized our own dual selves, even as 
 Tartarin of the Alps discovered what : 
 strange compound he was of the heroic 
 Quixote and the cowardly Sancho. ie 
 
 Benavente’s reputation as a practical 
 dramatist is shown by his recent appoint- 
 ment to the directorship of Spain’s great 
 National Theater. Having been an actor 
 and playwright, like Lope de Rueda, Shake- 
 speare, and Molitre, Benavente now be- 
 came a manager of his own plays, and it 
 was the level-headed Benavente who some- 
 where said that both Shakespeare and 
 Moliére made a great deal of money as — 
 managers. ahs 
 
 Thanks to the labors of Mr. Underhill, 
 whose renderings convey at once the spirit, _ 
 temperament, and the style of the author, 
 we now possess translations not only of 
 “La Malquerida,” “The Evil Doers of 
 Good,’ and “The Bonds of Interest,” 
 three plays of the highest order ; but also 
 of “The Governor’s Wife,’ a drama of 
 peice and social bossism, “ Princess 
 
 ebé,” a record of a serious and success- 
 ful search for truth amid many artificiali- 
 ties, and of “ Autumnal Roses,” the only 
 piece in which Benavente approaches the 
 problem play. It is to be hoped that in the 
 place of mediocre curtain-raisers like “ No 
 Smoking,” American readers may soon be 
 made acquainted with his other plays of 
 substance, such as “The Fire Dragon,” 
 “The Witches’ Sabbath,” or “ La comida 
 de las Fieras” (The Repast of Beasts), 
 which play Martinez Sierra pronounced 
 Benavente’s masterpiece. 
 
 A younger man than Benavente, from 
 whom he professes to have learned the 
 prince of the drama, is Martinez 
 
 ierra. His highest aspiration is to be a 
 Spanish dramatist. Spain for him is the 
 best of all possible lands, Spanish ideals 
 are unexcelled, Spanish women are the 
 most beautiful and the most virtuous. His 
 “Springtime in Autumn” extols Spanish 
 conjugal fidelity, his “ Mam4” features