Manchester High School - Somanhis Yearbook (Manchester, CT)

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20 -SOMANHIS EVENTS Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. To each they offer gitts after his will; Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all. l, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, Forgot my morning wishes, hastily Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent. I, too late, Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.” Since that time the Golden Stairs has been to me another poem on the Days, divinely beautiful. In Emerson's vision the Days offer gifts to man and pass judgments on his choices; in the vision of Burne-Jones the Days are a procession of Memories. How true to my own experiences the poem-picture is! As I review my life | see its Days, daughters of father Time, marching single in an endless file, coming, | know not whence, except from God above, and going, | know not whither, except through the dark portal of the tomb. In youth I looked jorward. Those were the days when the blue sky brought heaven near, and the gay bowers bloomed, and I made love like the doves, and furnished my nest like the swallow. Then came a day when I was conscious that shades of the prison house were closing about my spirit, and I heard a voice, Just heard, From some far shore, The final chorus sounding, I remember the day of my first bereavement, when my arm seemed bound with crepe.. I remember the day when at last | dropped the cypress spray of a great sorrow and my spirit sang again. Jj have had my days of joy, of doubt, of fear, of dream; I remember days that stand apart from all others. ’ remember one group of days so crowded with happy experiences that | cannot now assign to each day its due. I know that now I am beginning to look backward; my thoughts are too ready to fall into the formulas with which age begins to preach: ‘““When I was young,—ah, in those days,—we used to do so differently!’ The days of my youth seem as near and as real to me as yesterday; in fact the early days loom larger than today, as Burne- Jones suggests. I know, too, that there will come a day when my head shall wear the laurel wreath of the victor, or go crownless through the narrow por- tal of the grave. I see now that while each day I felt free to play or to keep silent as seemed good to me at the moment, I was not wholly free. Each day formed a part of a whole I did not plan and could not know. I real- ize that any day I might have met with accident through carelessness or wilfulness, but that I have been kept from falling by some gracious Prov- idence that will continue to guide my steps to the end. I admit that I have been an unprofitable servant. Many a day, with the fair gift of God in my hand, I have made no music; many a day I have communed with my own sad heart when I should have cheered my neighbor in his grief. But on the whole, life has been good—the stair has been golden. After twenty years with this picture in photograph only, I saw the original painting. The stairs are golden indeed! The whole canvas burns with the soft, subdued radiance of an Indian summer afternoon, when all the earth seems waiting for a revelation, As I sat long before it, something of the peace that passes understanding stole upon my spirit, a peace that glowed with joy when I discovered that the lowly portal did not give entrance to a darkened room, as I had thought, but to a hall whose. golden roof was upheld by polished shafts of precious marble. Perhaps, at last, what seemed to me the iron grating of a tomb may prove to be the pillars in the temple of my God.

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SOMANHIS. EVENTS 19 CLASS GIFT’ Editor's Note: —The Class of Nineteen Twenty has presented S, M. H, S. with a picture entitled ‘“The Gold- en Stairs’? by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in memory of Ruth Harris Nineteen Twenty, It has been hung just outside the senior rooms on the South Stairway. The following article is an interpretation of the picture by Henry Turner Bailey. ' THE GOLDEN STAIRS. By Sir Edward Burne-Jones. I fell in love with the Golden Stairs at first sight, and in photograph, where nothing appeared golden but the silence of those graceful maidens. For months the print hung in my study where I could see it every time I looked up. I was told that the picture was designed in 1872, actually begun in 1876, and finished in 1880. Eight years of brooding! Thrice was it named, —The King’s Wedding ,Music on the Stairs; The Golden Stairs. After all what matters life—history or name? The thing is beautiful. Isn’t that sul- ficient excuse for being? But I could not resist its invitation. The picture challenged me perpetually to disover a meaning in those orderly arrange- ments of line and austerities of composition, Burne-Jones, bred in the at- mosphere of learning and religion, dedicated to the church, a poet in thought and a symbolist by nature, could not have spent eight years on a meaningless design! It must carry a message of some sort from his heart to mine. I searched every square inch of its surface. I found a procession without beginning and without end, coming from above, descending, careless of per- spective, a narrow unguarded stairway of marble, and disappearing within a darkened room. In the upper part of the picture doves are making love to one another in the sunshine, two swallows have found a home for them- selves beneath the eaves, and roses bloom on the wall. In the lower part a laurel stands by an open door. At first the maidens look forward, at last they all look backward. Some are pensive, somé are anxious, some dream, some are sad; only one is joyous, and her joy swims upon the top of fear. Some are crowned with flowers, some wear mourning, sprays of cypress have fallen on the stairs. Many have musical instruments—perhaps all—but only two or three are playing and these with the spirit far away. One maiden listens to sounds from the darkened room, two maidens talk together pleas- antly, three whisper to one another, fearfully. All look alike, and yet are different; each seems free, but is held fast in the severe lines of the design. The curve of the stairs is completed by the edges of the robes. This curve is echoed by another, which binds the upper maidens to those below, and then, to make assurance doubly sure, a third great curve binds these two to- gether. Not a feature is out of place; every spot and line, every fold and surface helps define the harmony of pattern, The King’s Wedding? then a most solemn one! Music on the Stairs? then most inadequate music! The Golden Stairs? One cannot think of stairs while the mysterious procession is descending! No; the picture has a deeper meaning. It is a symbol of some- thing vast and rich. What is its message? One red-letter day on an express train in Montana I heard Dr. William T. Harris interpret Emerson’s Days: “Daughters of time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file.

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SOMANHIS EVENTS — — 2s THE VALUE OF THE SPOKEN DRAMA Critics all over the world are telling us that the drama has deteriorat- ed and degenerated, and that it has fallen below its former high standard, that it has given up its place as the highest of all the arts, and has lost its popularity and public support because moving pictures and modern novels offer a cheap substitute; and they are right to a great extent. The actors are, for the most part, inferior to those of the past few decades, and tie plays put upon our modern stages are often not fit to be seen, Under such conditions is it any wonder that most of us have forgotten or are unmindful of the value of the spoken drama? But the fault lies within ourselves. Drama, unlike the other arts, must have public support in order to live. Consequently, the drama must give the public what it wants, and it is our own fault if we do not demand art instead of trash. The average person today thinks of the drama, not as an art, but as a form of entertainment; and so long as the public does think of it as such, that is all that it will be. Some few people will point out the drama as being of value because of its educational power. Take, for instance,, the morality play ‘‘Experience,” or a play like Booth Tarkington’s “Poldekin,” which opened in New York in the early part of April, and which emphasizes another phase of the educational value of the drama. The latter is a play, based on the absurdities of certain Bolshevik ideas, that can not help but react on all who see it as anti-Bolshevik propaganda; and herein lies the secret of the educational value of the drama. Under the guise of enter- tainment it entices thousands to listen to lectures on morality and great public questions which they would otherwise pass by unheeding. | This, however, is not what makes the drama of such vital importance to us. The true value of the spoken drama is not as an amusement or as an educational institution, but as the greatest of all the arts. First, above all else, drama is an art; not as many believe, simply a meeting place of the other arts,, but an art in itself. True, the drama does employ the services of artists, sculptors, dancers, and musicians as well as actors and playwrights; but when they have thus come together their individual- ity is lost. No longer do they appear as separate arts, but as one great art—the greatest of them all; an art based upon five all-important ele- ments: action, words, line, color, and rhythm. There is no art which can exist and not rely on one or more of these basic principles, and there is no other art except the drama which contains them all. The drama to- day, as it has been through all the centuries of the past, must be ac- knowledged, the greatest of all arts. When you have measured the value of beautiful pictures, wonderful statues, inspiring music, exquisite poetry and literary masterpices, and when you have added all these together and thrown in the art of the actor, then, and then only, can you estimate the true value of the spoken drama. Jut now let us look at the drama from an amateur’s point of view. Those who are interested or have looked into the matter claim that Com- munity Drama is of the greatest importance in social work. Louise Burleigi defines it in this way: ‘The Community Theater is a house of play which offers to every member of body politic active participation in) a ;com- mon interest.” Drama is the only art which has ever been or can ever be put on a democratic basis. It is the only art which needs great num- bers, and it is the only art in which uneducated masses can take part. All are needed, and when they are gathered together for amusement and recre- ation, a spirit of friendliness and neighborliness will grow, and continue to grow until the whole community is united in one great common in-