Books: Percy MacKaye

No student in a drama department of a woman’s club gets very far without encountering the name of Percy MacKaye. He was America’s most brilliant poet-playwright at a very young age. He is still that. America has no others; but Mr. MacKaye has never written a play which can touch his earliest efforts. The Canterbury Pilgrims and The Scarecrow remain his finest achievements. Too early he was entrammelled by the lure of pageantry. Too early he listened to the flattery of academicians and literary ladies. The son of a practical playwright of fame and success, he has made himself into a worshipper of closet drama, of dancing figures in cheesecloth, of symbolism and of dialect. Had this genius chosen to explore life and write of it as he found it, he might have been mentioned in the same breath as Eugene O’Neill.

MacKaye was born in Manhattan, although he tells me that his family moved to Brattleboro shortly after, where his playwright father worked in the house later occupied by Kipling. He studied at Harvard and in Europe. He traveled widely. He taught and lectured. He has planned pageants such as Caliban. He has written any num-ber of odes for this and that celebration. He has written as ambitious a narrative poem as Dogtown Common. Two of his books have become operas and both have been sung by major organizations. Now he has buried himself in the Kentucky mountains where, with Mrs. Mac-Kaye, he has studied the natives, their strange language and customs and has already written five plays concerning these simple folk. The first (This Fine Pretty World), recently produced in Manhattan, met with high critical acclaim. Such is Percy MacKaye’s career.

But there is something strangely absent! There is a content with dreary poetical effects which, I hesitate to say, seem sloppy when coming from a man of such great potentiality. At 14 I worshiped Mr. MacKaye. He was the modern drama to me; and if I cry out against an early hero, it is only because he seems to me to be too consciously striving for an effect, really to allow himself his own greatness.

J. F.