effect: “You are the real wonder boy”—they were instantly able to respond to the sudden Hatcherian chuckle with quiet laughter of their own.
Again, he once came back from New York with an amusing story of a visit he had paid to the famous producer, David Belasco. And he described drolly how he had followed a barefoot, snaky-looking female, clad in a long batik gown, through seven Gothic chambers mystical with chimes and incense. And finally he told how he had been ushered into the presence of the great ecclesiastic who sat at the end of a cathedral-like room beneath windows of church glass, and how he was preceded all the time by Snaky Susie who swept low in obeisance as she approached, and said in a silky voice—“One is here to see you, Mahster,” and how she had been dismissed with Christ-like tone and movement of the hand—“Rise, Rose, and leave us now.” Professor Hatcher told this story with a quiet drollery that was irresistible, and was rewarded all along by their shouts of astounded laughter, and finally by their smiling and astonished faces, lifting disbelieving eyebrows at each other, saying, “Simply incredible! It doesn’t seem possible!… Marvellous!”
Finally, when Professor Hatcher talked to them of how a Russian actress used her hands, of rhythm, tempo, pause, and timing, of lighting, setting, and design, he gave them a language they could use with a feeling of authority and knowledge, even when authority and knowledge were lacking to them. It was a dangerous and often very trivial language—a kind of jargonese of art that was coming into use in the world of those days, and that seemed to be coincident with another jargonese—that of science—“psychology,” as they called it—which was also coming into its brief hour of idolatry at about the same period, and which bandied about its talk of “complexes,” “fixations,” “repressions,” “inhibitions,” and the like, upon the lips of any empty-headed little fool that came along.
But although this jargon was perhaps innocuous enough when rattled off the rattling tongue of some ignorant boy or rattle-pated girl, it could be a very dangerous thing when uttered seriously by men who were trying to achieve the best, the rarest, and the highest life on earth—the life which may be won only by bitter toil and knowledge and stern living—the life of the artist.
And the great danger of this glib and easy jargon of the arts was this: that instead of knowledge, the experience of hard work and patient living,
