'Ca'se on de question ob dese names I sho is hed mah mine _Per_zactly an' _per_cidedly done med up all de time; Fer mah po' Ceely Ann--yas, Lawd, Jes nigh afo' she died, She name' dis gal, "Neu-ral-gy," her boy twin, "Hom-i-cide."
FOOTNOTE:
[32] Copyright, 1908, by B. W. Dodge and Company.
WILLIAM T. PRICE
William Thompson Price, dramatic critic, creator of playwrights, was born near Louisville, Kentucky, December 17, 1846. He was educated in the private schools of Louisville, but the Civil War proved more interesting than text-books, so he ran away with Colonel E. P. Clay, whom he left, in turn, for John H. Morgan, and Generals Forrest and Wheeler. He was finally captured and imprisoned but he, of course, escaped. After the war Mr. Price went to Germany and studied for three years at the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin. From 1875 to 1880 he was dramatic critic for the Louisville _Courier-Journal_; and the following five years he devoted to editorial work for various newspapers, and to collecting material for his enormous biography of the Rev. George O. Barnes, a noted and eccentric Kentucky evangelist, which appeared under the title of _Without Scrip or Purse_ (Louisville, 1883). Mr. Price went to New York in the early eighties, and that city has remained his home to this day. In 1885 he was dramatic critic for the now defunct New York _Star_, which he left after a year to become a reader of new plays for A. M. Palmer, the leading manager of his time, whom he was associated with for more than twenty years. Mr. Price's _The Technique of the Drama_ (New York, 1892), gave him a high position among the dramatic writers of the country. A new edition of it was called for in 1911, and it seems destined to remain the chief authority in its field for many years. In 1901 Mr. Price became playreader for Harrison Grey Fiske; and in the same year he founded the American School of Playwriting, in which men and women, whom the gods forgot, are transformed into great dramatists--perhaps! His second volume upon the stage, _The Analysis of Play Construction and Dramatic Principle_ (New York, 1908), is the text-book of his school. At the present time Mr. Price is editor of _The American Playwright_, a monthly magazine of dramatic discussion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Letters from Mr. Price to the present writer; _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).
THE OFFENBACH AND GILBERT OPERAS[33]
[From _The Technique of the Drama_ (New York, 1892)]
The light-hearted genius of Paris composed a new style of opera for the general merriment of the world. Who can describe the surprises, the quaintness of song, the drolleries of action of the Offenbach school? It was the intoxicating wine of music. Gladstone, when premier of England, found time to say that the world owed as much in its civilization to the discovery of the fiddle as it did to steam.
This cannot be applied in its whole sense to Offenbach, but this master of satire and the sensuous certainly expressed his times. He set laughter to song. It was democratic. It spared not king, courtier, or the rabble. It was wisdom and sentiment in disguise. It was born among despotisms, and jested when kingdoms fell. It was the stalking horse behind which Offenbach hunted the follies of the day and bagged the absurdities of the hour. If it had _double entendre_, its existence had a double meaning. Its music and purpose defied national prejudices. Under its laughter-compelling notes the sober bass-viol put on a merry disposition, and your cornet-a-piston became a wag. It was flippant, the glorification of youthful mirth and feelings, and it made many a melancholy Jacques sing again the song of Beranger,
"_Comme je regrette ma jambe si dodu._"
It is not the purpose here to commend its delirious dances, but to admit that there was genius in it. In a technical sense the dramatic part of them are models compared with the inane and vague compositions of a later school.
The opera bouffe is in a stage beyond decadence, and no longer regards consistency, even of nonsense, in its dramatic elements. Some of the conventionalisms of its technique remain.
We hear again and again the old choruses, the drinking songs, the letter songs, the wine songs, the conspirators' songs, the departure for the war, the lovers' duets, and what-not, with the old goblets, the old helmets and all in use; but order is lost, and the topical song often saves the public patience, apart from the _disjecta membra_, upon which are fed the eye and the ear.
The Gilbert opera. The delicate foolery of Gilbert and the interpreting melody of Sullivan created an inimitable form of opera that delighted its generations. In its way perfection marks it. There is much in it that ministers to inward quiet and enjoyment. "Pinafore," "The Mikado,"
and all the list, are products of genius. "Ruddygore" is structurally weak, proving that even nonsense must have a logical treatment.
Successful in a manner as "Ruddygore" was, it was filled with characteristic quaintness. We accept Rose Maybud as a piece of good luck, from the moment her modest slippers demurely patter to the front; and it is a sober statement to say that our generation has seen nothing more charming than her artful artlessness and innocence. She is worthy of Gilbert. His taste is refined beyond the point of vulgarity in essence or by way of expediency. His fancy is not tainted with the corruption of flesh-tight limbs, and he holds fast only to such physical allurements as the "three little maids just from school" in the "Mikado"
or the impossibly good and dainty Rose Maybud may tempt us with. In the dance there is no lasciviousness, only joy. Gilbert and Sullivan have called a halt to the can-can and bid the world be decent. The whole history of comic opera is filled with proof that music first consented to lend itself to foolery on condition that there should be some heart in it; and even Offenbach, the patriarch of libidinous absurdities, could not get along without stopping by the wayside to make his sinners sing love-songs filled with pure emotion.
Rose Maybud is a piece of delicate coquetry with the mysterious simplicity of maidenhood, giving offense in no way. These authors are satirists, not burlesquers and fakirs.
FOOTNOTE:
[33] Copyright, 1892, by Brentano's.
GEORGE M. DAVIE
George Montgomery Davie, a verse-maker of cleverness and charm, was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, March 16, 1848. He began his collegiate career at Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, but he later went to Princeton, from which institution he was graduated in 1868.
Two years later he established himself as a lawyer at Louisville.
Davie rose rapidly in his profession, and he was soon recognized as one of the ablest lawyers in Kentucky. Though busy with his practice, he found time to write verse and short prose papers for periodicals that were appreciated by many persons. Davie was a Latinist of decided ability, and he often employed himself in turning the odes of Horace into English. His original work, however, is very charming and clever, a smile being concealed in almost every line he wrote, though it is a very quiet and dignified smile, never boisterous. He was one of the founders of the now celebrated Filson Club, of Louisville. He died at New York, February 22, 1900, but he sleeps to-day in Louisville's beautiful Cave Hill cemetery. _Verses_ (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.), a broadside, contains Davie's best original poems and translations and it is a very scarce item at this time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Courier-Journal_ (February 23, 1900); _Kentucky Eloquence_ (Louisville, 1907).
"FRATER, AVE ATQUE VALE!"
(Catullus, Car. CI.)
[From _Verses_ (Louisville, Kentucky, n. d.)]
Through many nations, over many seas, Brother, I come to thy sad obsequies: To bring the last gifts for the dead to thee, And speak to thy mute ashes--left to me By the hard fate, that on a cruel day, From me, dear brother, called Thyself away.
Receive these gifts, wet with fraternal tears; And the last rites, that custom old endears; These fond memorials would my sorrow tell-- Brother! forever, hail thee--and farewell!
HADRIAN, DYING, TO HIS SOUL
[From the same]
Animula vagula blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula rigida nudula; Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos?
Thou sprite! so charming, uncontrolled, Guest and companion of my clay, Into what places wilt thou stray, When thou art naked, pale, and cold?
Wilt then make merry--as of old?
JOHN URI LLOYD
John Uri Lloyd, novelist and scientist, was born at West Bloomfield, New York, April 19, 1849. He is the son of a civil engineer who came West, in 1853, for the purpose of surveying a railroad between Covington and Louisville, known as the "River Route." Mr. Lloyd was thus four years old when his father settled at Burlington, Boone county, Kentucky, near the line of the road. The panic of 1854 came and the railroad company failed, but his parents preferred their new Kentucky home to the old home in the East, and they decided to remain, taking up their first vocations, that of teaching. For several years they taught in the village schools of the three little Kentucky towns of Burlington, Petersburg, and Florence. Mr. Lloyd lived at Florence until he was fourteen years of age, when he was apprenticed to a Cincinnati druggist, but he continued to be a resident of Kentucky until 1876, since which time he has lived at Cincinnati. In 1878 he became connected with the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy, and this connection has continued to the present day. In 1880 he was married to a Kentucky woman. Mr. Lloyd is one of the most distinguished pharmaceutical chemists in the United States. He has a magnificent library and museum upon his subjects; and he is generally conceded to be the world's highest authority on puff-balls. Mr. Lloyd's scientific works include _The Chemistry of Medicines_ (1881); _Drugs and Medicines of North America_ (1884); _King's American Dispensatory_ (1885); _Elixirs, their History and Preparation_ (1892); and he, as president, has edited the publications of the Lloyd Library, as follows: _Dr. B. S. Barton's Collections_ (1900); _Dr. Peter Smith's Indian Doctor's Dispensatory_ (1901); _A Study in Pharmacy_ (1902); _Dr. David Schopf's Materia Medica Americana_ (1903); _Dr. Manasseh Cutler's Vegetable Productions_ (1903); _Reproductions from the Works of William Downey, John Carver, and Anthony St. Storck_ (1907); _Hydrastis Canadensis_ (1908); _Samuel Thomson and Thomsonian Materia Medica_ (1909). Dr. Lloyd has won his general reputation as a writer of novels descriptive of life in northern Kentucky. His first work to attract wide attention was entitled _Etidorpha, or the End of Earth_ (New York, 1895), a work which involved speculative philosophy. This was followed by a little story, _The Right Side of the Car_ (Boston, 1897). Then came the Stringtown stories, which made his reputation.
"Stringtown" is the fictional name for the Kentucky Florence of his boyhood. There are four of them: _Stringtown on the Pike_ (New York, 1900); _Warwick of the Knobs_ (New York, 1901); _Red Head_ (New York, 1903); and _Scroggins_ (New York, 1904). In these stories the author's aim was not to be engaged solely as a novelist, "but to portray to outsiders a phase of life unknown to the world at large, and to establish a folk-lore picture in which the scenes that occurred in times gone by, would be paralleled in the events therein narrated."
_Stringtown on the Pike_ is Mr. Lloyd's best known book, but _Warwick of the Knobs_ is far and way the finest of the four.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Bookman_ (May, 1900); _The Outlook_ (November 16, 1901); _The Bookman_ (December, 1910).
"LET'S HAVE THE MERCY TEXT"[34]
[From _Warwick of the Knobs_ (New York, 1901)]
Warwick made no movement; no word of greeting came from his lips, no softening touch to his furrowed brow, no sparkle to his cold, gray eye. As though gazing upon a stranger, he sat and pierced the girl through and through with a formal stare, that drove despair deeper into her heart and caused her to cling closer to her brother.
"Pap, sister's home ag'in," the youth repeated.
"I know nothing of a sister who claims a home here."