Vol. VI No. 1 - Modernist Magazines Project

IN PRAISE OF THE IMMODERATE
the most exciting city in the world. Nowhere else do actors and plays
so excellent and so infamous rub shoulders with each other so intimately.
Paris achieves a certain Sorellesque technique, London a certain Etonian
propriety, but they only rarely achieve the peaks or abysses of New
York. It is not only in a metropolis that you may hope to attain
either extremity. In Mantua last year I saw an Italian fit-up company
act so transcendently that I grow pale with bliss and pain at the memory
of it. This same year in Marrakech, which lies in Morocco under the
tall Atlas mountains, I saw a company of such cretins perform a revue
entitled "Un Chleuh! dans la Soupe," that I grow pale with bliss and
pain at the memory of it. But the experience whither all this is
leading was more beatific than Mantua or Marrakech, more astounding
than Broadway. For upon one and the same evening, in one and the
same theatre, the miracle of synthesis was accomplished. The extremes
coincided. The fallacy of the Hellenist's golden mean was for me
forever exploded.
This was the way in which it happened. My friend and I had
several hours to spend in a certain provincial city before a midnight
train bore us townward. From the very moment we set eyes upon
the Tivoli Theatre, we knew that no other place in that city could
so reward us for our patronage. Here there was no chance that the
fitful evasions of the mediocre would insult us. The very title of the
revue, pictured upon shrieking posters—"Topsy Trotter Turns Turtle"
—was a psean of imbecility. And that no detail of its marvel should
escape us, we entered the Grand Box, so commanding with several
senses a panorama of stage and draughty wings.
The chorus was expatiating on the appetites of married men for a
weeny bit of tootsy-wootsy in the "pile" moonlight. Such mournful
and such haggard ladies, such cornflake voices. "But this," we whispered
to each other idiomatically, "is the stuff!" Upon the appearance of
male flesh in the box the chant was temporarily suspended until the
ladies had made valuations and comments. The silk-hatted leading
gentleman, who had been reprimanding the totally inefficient limelightman,
gesticulated ferociously chorus-wards from the shadows. The
singing was resumed, with sudden ascents into aerial static, with sudden
descents into mediumistic ventriloquisms. The dresses bawled with
every unintended discordance of colour, magenta rubbing shoulders
with terra cotta, shrill green with kaffir pink.
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