of the theatre accounts for the practical disappearance of the element
of fearlessness in critical dealing with the art of the stage,
particularly as the business control of the theatre is largely
responsible for whatever decline we may discern in the art of the
theatre. Of course, if criticism were content to concern itself only
with results, and not to look for causes, the matter of business
interests would figure little in the discussion. But when the critic
dares to go below the surface and discern commercialism as the main
cause of the decline that he condemns in the art of the stage, he finds
himself on dangerous ground.
The theatre has always had to have its business side. Actors must live
and the accessories of their art must be provided. To this extent the
stage has always catered to the public. But from the days of the
strolling player to those of the acting-manager the voice from back of
the curtain has, until of recent years, had at least as much of command
as that of the ticket-seller. Both in the theatre and in the press
modern conditions have in great measure thrown the control to the
material side; and just as the artist and dramatist have become
subservient to the manager, the editor and critic have come under the
domination of the publisher.
The need of a greater revenue to house plays and public has placed the
theatre in the hands of those who could manage to secure that revenue.
The same necessity on the material and mechanical side has put the power
of the press in the hands of those who could best supply its financial
needs. With both theatre and press on a commercial basis, it follows
naturally that the art of acting and the art of criticism should both
decline.
Here we have the main causes that work from the inside for the
deterioration of an art and for the destruction of the standards by
which that art is measured. The outside causes are, of course, the basic
ones, but before we get to them we must understand the connecting links
which join the cause to the effect. To-day we certainly have no Hazlitts
or Sarceys writing for the American press. It might be enlightening with
respect to present conditions to consider the probabilities and
circumstances of their employment if they were here and in the flesh.
Can any one conceive of an American newspaper giving space to Hazlitt’s
work, even if he treated of the things of to-day? Even if he wrote his
opinions gratis and in the form of letters to the editor, it would
presumably be indeed a dull journalistic day when room could be found
for them.
Sarcey, writing in the lighter French vein and being almost as much a
chroniqueur as a critic, might possibly have found opportunity to be
read in an American newspaper, if he could have curbed his independence
of thought. Starting from obscurity, it is a question whether he would
ever have been able to gain opportunity to be read simply as a critic,
for the processes by which newspaper critics are created or evolved seem
to have nothing to do with the possession of education, training, or
ability. In the majority of newspaper offices the function of dramatic
critic devolves by chance or convenience, and frequently goes by
favoritism to some member of the staff with a fondness for the theatre
and an appreciation of free seats. One of New York’s best known dailies
frankly treats theatrical reviewing as nothing more than reportorial
work, to be covered as would be any other news assignment. This
publication and a good many others are far more particular about the
technical equipment of the writers who describe baseball games,
horse-races, and prize-fights, than about the fitness of those who are
to weigh the merits of plays and acting. The ability to write without
offending the advertising theatrical manager seems in the last case to
be the only absolutely essential qualification.
With these things in mind it will be seen that there is little to tempt
any one with ambition to contemplate dramatic criticism as a possible
profession. The uncertainty of employment, the slenderness of return,
and the limitations on freedom of expression would keep even the most
ardent lover of the theatre from thinking of criticism as a life
occupation. Given the education, the experience, the needed judicial
temperament, and the writing ability, all these are no assurance that
opportunity can be found to utilize them.
Of themselves, the conditions that surround the calling of the critic
are enough to account for the absence from the American newspapers of
authoritative criticism. These conditions might be overcome if the
spirit of the times demanded. But there can be no such demand so long as
the press finds it more profitable to reflect the moods, thoughts, and
opinions of the public than to lead and direct them. When the changed
conditions of producing newspapers transferred the control of their
policy from the editorial rooms to the counting-rooms, the expression of
opinion on any subject became of little value compared with catering to
the popular love of sensation and the popular interest in the trivial.
The change does not mean that there is any ignoring of the theatre in
the newspapers. The institution lends itself admirably to modern
newspaper exploitation. Destroying the fascinating mystery which once
shrouded life back of the curtain, for a long time made good copy for
the press. There is no longer any mystery, because the great space that
the newspapers devote to gossip of the theatre and its people has
flooded with publicity every corner of the institution and every event
of their lives. The process has been aided by managers through a perhaps
mistaken idea of the value of the advertising, and by artists for that
reason and for its appeal to their vanity.
Criticism has no place in publicity of this sort, because criticism
concerns itself only with the art and the broad interests of the
theatre. The news reporter is often better qualified to describe the
milk-baths of a stage notoriety than is the ablest critic. With our
newspapers as they are, and with our public as it is, the reportorial
account of the milk-bath is of more value to the newspaper and its
readers than the most brilliant criticism that could be written of an
important event in the art of the theatre.
With “give the people what they want” the prevailing law of press and
theatre, it is idle just now to look for dramatic criticism of value in
our newspapers. We may flatter ourselves that as a people we have a real
interest in theatrical and other arts. We can prove it by the vast sums
we spend on theatres, music, and pictures. With all our proof, we at
heart know that this is not true. Even in the more sensual art of music
we import our standards, in pictures we are governed more by cost than
quality, and in the theatre—note where most of our expenditure goes. In
that institution, with the creation of whose standards we are concerning
ourselves just now, consider the character of what are called “popular
successes,” and observe the short shrift given to most of the efforts
which call for enjoyment of the finer art of the stage through
recognition of that art when it is displayed.
It is no disgrace that we are not an artistic people. Our
accomplishments and our interests are in other fields, where we more
than match the achievements of older civilizations. With us the theatre
is not an institution to which we turn for its literature and its
interpretations of character. We avoid it when it makes any demand on
our thinking powers. We turn to it as a relaxation from the use of those
powers in more material directions. We do not wish to study our stage,
its methods and its products. We ask it only to divert us. This is the
general attitude of the American to the theatre, and the exceptions are
few.
In these conditions it is not strange that we have no scholarly critics
to help in establishing standards for our theatre, or that there is
little demand for real criticism, least of all in the daily press. As we
grow to be an older and more leisurely country, when our masses cease to
find in the crudities of the moving-picture their ideal of the drama,
and when our own judgments become more refined, we shall need the real
critic, and even the daily press will find room for his criticisms and
reward for his experience, ability, and judgment.
The province and profit of our newspapers lie in interesting their
readers. Analysis of artistic endeavor is not interesting to a people
who have scant time and little inclination for any but practical and
diverting things. Until the people demand it and the conditions that
surround the critic improve, what passes for criticism in our daily
press is not likely to increase in quantity or improve in quality.
THE HUMOR OF THE COLORED SUPPLEMENT
BY RALPH BERGENGREN
I
Ten or a dozen years ago,—the exact date is here immaterial,—an
enterprising newspaper publisher conceived the idea of appealing to what
is known as the American “sense of humor” by printing a so-called comic
supplement in colors. He chose Sunday as of all days the most lacking in
popular amusements, carefully restricted himself to pictures without
humor and color without beauty, and presently inaugurated a new era in
American journalism. The colored supplement became an institution. No
Sunday is complete without it—not because its pages invariably delight,
but because, like flies in summer, there is no screen that will
altogether exclude them. A newspaper without a color press hardly
considers itself a newspaper, and the smaller journals are utterly
unmindful of the kindness of Providence in putting the guardian angel,
Poverty, outside their portals. Sometimes, indeed, they think to outwit
this kindly interference by printing a syndicated comic page without
color; and mercy is thus served in a half portion, for, uncolored, the
pictures are inevitably about twice as attractive. Some print them
without color, but on pink paper. Others rejoice, as best they may, in a
press that will reproduce at least a fraction of the original discord.
One and all they unite vigorously, as if driven by a perverse and
cynical intention, to prove the American sense of humor a thing of
national shame and degradation. Fortunately the public has so little to
say about its reading matter that one may fairly suspend judgment.
For, after all, what is the sense of humor upon which every man prides
himself, as belonging only to a gifted minority? Nothing more nor less
than a certain mental quickness, alert to catch the point of an anecdote
or to appreciate the surprise of a new and unexpected point of view
toward an old and familiar phenomenon. Add together these gifted
minorities, and each nation reaches what is fallaciously termed the
national sense of humor—an English word, incidentally, for which
D’Israeli was unable to find an equivalent in any other language, and
which is in itself simply a natural development of the critical faculty,
born of a present need of describing what earlier ages had taken for
granted. The jovial porter and his charming chance acquaintances, the
three ladies of Bagdad, enlivened conversation with a kind of humor,
carefully removed from the translation of commerce and the public
libraries, for which they needed no descriptive noun, but which may
nevertheless be fairly taken as typical of that city in the day of the
Caliph Haroun.
The Middle Ages rejoiced in a similar form of persiflage, and the
present day in France, Germany, England, or America, for example,
inherits it,—minus its too juvenile indecency,—in the kind of pleasure
afforded by these comic supplements. Their kinship with the lower
publications of European countries is curiously evident to whoever has
examined them. Vulgarity, in fact, speaks the same tongue in all
countries, talks, even in art-ruled France, with the same crude
draughtsmanship, and usurps universally a province that Emerson declared
“far better than wit for a poet or writer.” In its expression and
enjoyment no country can fairly claim the dubious superiority. All are
on the dead level of that surprising moment when the savage had ceased
to be dignified and man had not yet become rational. Men, indeed, speak
freely and vain-gloriously of their national sense of humor; but they
are usually unconscious idealists. For the comic cut that amuses the
most stupid Englishman may be shifted entire into an American comic
supplement; the “catastrophe joke” of the American comic weekly of the
next higher grade is stolen in quantity to delight the readers of
similar but more economical publications in Germany; the lower humor of
France, barring the expurgations demanded by Anglo-Saxon prudery, is
equally transferable; and the average American often examines on Sunday
morning, without knowing it, an international loan-exhibit.
Humor, in other words, is cosmopolitan, reduced, since usage insists on
reducing it, at this lowest imaginable level, to such obvious and
universal elements that any intellect can grasp their combinations. And
at its highest it is again cosmopolitan, like art; like art, a
cultivated characteristic, no more spontaneously natural than a “love of
nature.” It is an insult to the whole line of English and American
humorists—Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Meredith, Twain, Holmes, Irving,
and others of a distinguished company—to include as humor what is merely
the crude brutality of human nature, mocking at grief and laughing
boisterously at physical deformity. And in these Sunday comics Humor,
stolen by vandals from her honest, if sometimes rough-and-ready,
companionship, thrusts a woe-be-gone visage from the painted canvas of
the national side-show, and none too poor to “shy a brick” at her.
At no period in the world’s history has there been a steadier output of
so-called humor—especially in this country. The simple idea of printing
a page of comic pictures has produced families. The very element of
variety has been obliterated by the creation of types: a confusing
medley of impossible countrymen, mules, goats, German-Americans and
their irreverent progeny, specialized children with a genius for
annoying their elders, white-whiskered elders with a genius for playing
practical jokes on their grandchildren, policemen, Chinamen, Irishmen,
negroes, inhuman conceptions of the genus tramp, boy inventors whose
inventions invariably end in causing somebody to be mirthfully spattered
with paint or joyously torn to pieces by machinery, bright boys with a
talent for deceit, laziness, or cruelty, and even the beasts of the
jungle dehumanized to the point of practical joking. _Mirabile
dictu!_—some of these things have even been dramatized.
With each type the reader is expected to become personally
acquainted,—to watch for its coming on Sunday mornings, happily
wondering with what form of inhumanity the author will have been able to
endow his brainless manikins. And the authors are often men of
intelligence, capable here and there of a bit of adequate drawing and an
idea that is honestly and self-respectingly provocative of laughter.
Doubtless they are often ashamed of their product; but the demand of the
hour is imperative. The presses are waiting. They, too, are both quick
and heavy. And the cry of the publisher is for “fun” that no intellect
in all his heterogeneous public shall be too dull to appreciate. We see,
indeed, the outward manifestation of a curious paradox: humor prepared
and printed for the extremely dull, and—what is still more
remarkable—excused by grown men, capable of editing newspapers, on the
ground that it gives pleasure to children.
Reduced to first principles, therefore, it is not humor, but simply a
supply created in answer to a demand, hastily produced by machine
methods and hastily accepted by editors too busy with other editorial
duties to examine it intelligently. Under these conditions “humor” is
naturally conceived as something preëminently quick; and so quickness
predominates. Somebody is always hitting somebody else with a club;
somebody is always falling downstairs, or out of a balloon, or over a
cliff, or into a river, a barrel of paint, a basket of eggs, a
convenient cistern, or a tub of hot water. The comic cartoonists have
already exhausted every available substance into which one can fall, and
are compelled to fall themselves into a veritable ocean of vain
repetition. They have exhausted everything by which one can be blown up.
They have exhausted everything by which one can be knocked down or run
over. And if the victim is never actually killed in these mirthful
experiments, it is obviously because he would then cease to be
funny—which is very much the point of view of the Spanish Inquisition,
the cat with a mouse, or the American Indian with a captive. But respect
for property, respect for parents, for law, for decency, for truth, for
beauty, for kindliness, for dignity, or for honor, are killed, without
mercy. Morality alone, in its restricted sense of sexual relations, is
treated with courtesy, although we find throughout the accepted theory
that marriage is a union of uncongenial spirits, and the chart of petty
marital deceit is carefully laid out and marked for whoever is likely to
respond to endless unconscious suggestions. Sadly must the American
child sometimes be puzzled while comparing his own grandmother with the
visiting mother-in-law of the colored comic.
II
Lest this seem a harsh, even an unkind inquiry into the innocent
amusements of other people, a few instances may be mentioned, drawn from
the Easter Sunday output of papers otherwise both respectable and
unrespectable; papers, moreover, depending largely on syndicated humor
that may fairly be said to have reached a total circulation of several
million readers. We have, to begin with, two rival versions of a
creation that made the originator famous, and that chronicle the
adventures of a small boy whose name and features are everywhere
familiar. Often these adventures, in the original youngster, have been
amusing, and amusingly seasoned with the salt of legitimately absurd
phraseology. But the pace is too fast, even for the originator. The
imitator fails invariably to catch the spirit of them, and in this
instance is driven to an ancient subterfuge.
To come briefly to an unpleasant point: an entire page is devoted to
showing the reader how the boy was made ill by smoking his father’s
cigars. Incidentally he falls downstairs. Meanwhile, his twin is
rejoicing the readers of another comic supplement by spoiling a wedding
party; it is the minister who first comes to grief, and is stood on his
head, the boy who, later, is quite properly thrashed by an angry
mother—and it is all presumably very delightful and a fine example for
the imitative genius of other children. Further, we meet a mule who
kicks a policeman and whose owner is led away to the lockup; a manicured
vacuum who slips on a banana peel, crushes the box containing his
fiancée’s Easter bonnet, and is assaulted by her father (he, after the
manner of comic fathers, having just paid one hundred dollars for the
bonnet out of a plethoric pocketbook); a nondescript creature,
presumably human, who slips on another banana peel and knocks over a
citizen, who in turn knocks over a policeman, and is also marched off to
undeserved punishment. We see the German-American child covering his
father with water from a street gutter; another child deluging his
parent with water from a hose; another teasing his younger brother and
sister. To keep the humor of the banana peel in countenance, we find the
picture of a fat man accidentally sitting down on a tack; he exclaims,
“Ouch!” throws a basket of eggs into the air, and they come down on the
head of the boy who arranged the tacks. We see two white boys beating a
little negro over the head with a plank (the hardness of the negro’s
skull here affording the humorous _motif_), and we see an idiot blowing
up a mule with dynamite. Lunacy, in short, could go no further than this
pandemonium of undisguised coarseness and brutality—the humor offered on
Easter Sunday morning by leading American newspapers for the edification
of American readers.
And every one of the countless creatures, even to the poor, maligned
dumb animals, is saying something. To the woeful extravagance of foolish
acts must be added an equal extravagance of foolish words: “Out with
you, intoxicated rowdy!” “Shut up!” “Skidoo!” “They’ve set the dog on
me.” “Hee-haw.” “My uncle had it tooken in Hamburg.” “Dat old gentleman
will slip on dem banana skins,” “Little Buster got all that was coming
to him.” “Aw, shut up!” “Y-e-e-e G-o-d-s!” “Ouch!” “Golly, dynamite am
powerful stuff.” “I am listening to vat der vild vaves is sedding.” “I
don’t think Pa and I will ever get along together until he gets rid of
his conceit.” “Phew!”
The brightness of this repartee could be continued indefinitely;
profanity, of course, is indicated by dashes and exclamation points; a
person who has fallen overboard says, “Blub!” concussion is visibly
represented by stars; “biff” and “bang” are used, according to taste, to
accompany a blow on the nose or an explosion of dynamite.
From this brief summary it may be seen how few are the fundamental
conceptions that supply the bulk of almost the entire output, and in
these days of syndicated ideas a comparatively small body of men produce
the greater part of it. Physical pain is the most glaringly omnipresent
of these motifs; it is counted upon invariably to amuse the average
humanity of our so-called Christian civilization. The entire group of
Easter Sunday pictures constitutes a saturnalia of prearranged accidents
in which the artist is never hampered by the exigencies of logic;
machinery in which even the presupposed poorest intellect might be
expected to detect the obvious flaw accomplishes its evil purpose with
inevitable accuracy; jails and lunatic asylums are crowded with new
inmates; the policeman always uses his club or revolver; the parents
usually thrash their offspring at the end of the performance; household
furniture is demolished, clothes ruined, and unsalable eggs broken by
the dozen. Deceit is another universal concept of humor, which combines
easily with the physical pain _motif_; and mistaken identity, in which
the juvenile idiot disguises himself and deceives his parents in various
ways, is another favorite resort of the humorists. The paucity of
invention is hardly less remarkable than the willingness of the
inventors to sign their products, or the willingness of editors to
publish them. But the age is notoriously one in which editors underrate
and insult the public intelligence.