write a society play. It was like dramatizing a novel and trying to
create a heroine who would agree with the ten thousand notions of her
cherished by the ten thousand readers of the book. Gradually, as the
mirror held up to nature has become more nearly true, we have grown to
understand that, in the grip of a great joy or grief, a nobleman
behaves very much like a bricklayer; sometimes a trifle better, and
sometimes, as in the case of the bazaar disaster in Paris, a good deal
worse.
One fact not universally understood by persons who criticize the smart
set on the stage is that there are many kinds of society. The group
depicted in "Gallops" or "Lord and Lady Algy" is antipodally different
from that shown in "The Way of the World" or "His House in Order." The
self-made men of "The Pit" and "The Lion and the Mouse" are miles
removed from the aristocrats of "The Idler" or "A Royal Family." The
gambling males and cigarette-smoking females of "The Walls of Jericho"
and "The House of Mirth" have very little in common with the
conservatives of "The Hypocrites" and "The Duke of Killicrankie." All
society looks alike to the assistant dramatic editor, however, and, if
some girl delivers herself of a slang phrase, he is quick to realize
that the playwright who created her can know nothing of good form.
The man who deals with fashionables on the stage fingers a pianoforte
with a single octave. More than half of the conditions that produce
sentiment and sensation in Harlem never get as far down town as Fifth
Avenue. That is why most drawing room dramas are worked out with the
same characters and about the same stories. Someone has said that
there do not exist more than three plots for farce; certainly, not
more than ten have been used in society plays. Of these, the favorite
is the tale of the good-for-nothing gentleman who goes away with the
wife of the studious or hard-working hero. Sometimes, he is only
_about_ to go away with this malcontent when the hero aforesaid finds
her at midnight in the "rooms" of his rival. The places in which a
woman is found at midnight are always "rooms"; never, by any chance,
chambers, or apartments, or a flat. Occasionally, the lady, or the
gentleman, or both, are quite innocent of wrong-doing. The lady may
have come to save the reputation of another lady, or to prepare a
rarebit, but when the husband has tracked her by the fan that years of
Wilde have not taught such callers to hide with them, he gets into a
towering rage and does not get out again until the end of the fourth
act. Henry Arthur Jones calls tea the prop of our drama. I disagree
with him. It is the careless lady with a _penchant_ for nocturnal
visits who makes the theater possible in England and America. You
don't believe it? Well, some of the comedies produced in New York
during one season in which this incident figured were "Popularity",
"Man and His Angel", "The Chorus Lady", "The Three of Us", "The House
of Mirth", "Daughters of Men", "The Straight Road", and
"All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." James M. Barrie satirized the situation in
"Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire", and then employed it seriously for his most
effective scene.
[Illustration: "_The lady may have come to prepare a rarebit_"]
Of course, one or two of the pieces in the list given do not come
strictly under the head of drawing room drama, but the fact remains
that a majority of the young women who go calling on the stroke of
twelve dive into indiscretion under Marcel waves. The coveting of his
neighbor's wife is supposed to be a specialty of the society man, and
thus it is that so many comedies of manors are founded on that theme.
The marriage of convenience is much used in plays of this type, too,
as well as the _mesalliance_ that afterward turns out well. Divorce is
coming more and more into vogue as a subject. Then there are satires
in which the follies of the smart set are held up to ridicule and
execration; comedies in which the vulgarisms of a very rich man,
usually an American and father of the heroine, are contrasted
favorably with the culture of the aristocracy of Europe; and plays in
which the wronged girl figures, wearing a wan expression and a
becoming black dress. Add to these varieties that class of composition
in which society is only the background for contests in politics,
diplomacy, business, or detective work, and we have pretty well come
to the end of our possibilities.
Whatever else happens in the society play, there always is a dance at
which the juvenile lovers flirt, and the serious people discuss such
tragic things as ruin and sudden death, while an orchestra "off at R."
fiddles through "Love's Dream After the Ball." Next to elopements,
ruin and sudden death are the chief necessities of the society play.
Whenever a gentleman gets on the wrong side of the market, or has the
misfortune to possess a wife whose lover is the hero of the piece,
instead of the villain, he promptly kills himself. After reading a
succession of dramas like "The Climbers" and "The Moth and the Flame"
one is amazed to discover that in the United States only about one
hundreth of one per cent. of the population cashes in its checks
self-endorsed.
If you have followed so far, patient peruser, you probably will join
me in the conclusion that the society play is nothing on earth but
melodrama in a frock coat. The effectiveness of the play depends upon
the completeness of the disguise; with the dramatic tailor rests the
question whether you sniff or sniffle. Undraped melodrama treating of
fashionable folk is the funniest entertainment in the world, excepting
"Charley's Aunt." Fine evenings, when my brain cells were closed for
repairs and I was weary of musical comedy, I used to go over to Eighth
Avenue and see "Why Women Sin" and "A Working Girl's Wrongs." I found
that our class is responsible alike for the sins and the wrongs; that
gentility is a thing to move virtuous burglars, comic green grocers
and other honest men and women to a passion of righteous indignation.
"I was ne'er so thrummed since I was gentleman", wrote Thomas Dekker
in an ancient comedy of unprintable title, and it is my opinion that
he penned the line after seeing his kind through the astigmatic
glasses of Theodore Kremer. Small wonder, indeed! On Eighth Avenue,
in the old days, everyone sufficiently prosperous to be opposed to an
income tax wore a silk hat and lived in a "mansion." Apparently
"mansions" were not places in which privacy was to be had, since the
Eighth Avenue millionaire invariably came out into the street when he
wanted to exhibit "the papers." Eighth Avenue millionaires always were
white-haired, drank cold tea and soda, plotted "dirty work", and had
closets so full of skeletons that any physician might have mistaken
them for anatomical museums. "Little children", I used to say to the
progeny of a friend of mine, "when you grow up be careful not to be an
Eighth Avenue millionaire."
The smart set have rather a hard time of it on any stage, and, for
that matter, so does the author who dallies with the subject. If there
is one thing in which the dramatic _grand monde_ are lucky it is their
servants. Nowhere else under the blue canopy of heaven are such
perfectly trained menials as one sees through the proscenium arch.
They would make the fortune of any of those agencies misnamed
"intelligence bureaus."
[Illustration: "_Why women sin_"]
I already have commented on the difficulties of the man who writes
drawing room drama. I have said that, if he has a stirring story to
tell, he must disguise it. On the other hand, if it be his ambition to
compose comedies of manners, like "The Liars", he must master the very
fine art of interesting an audience for two hours without actually
doing anything; of making a vacuum shimmer. The people in such society
plays must talk like ordinary people who have been seeing society
plays. Their dialogue must be cynical and clever, and just a bit what
a witty Frenchman called "_sans chemise_." A society play excellently
exemplifies the truth of the adage: "Nothing _risque_; nothing
gained." Should the conversation be truly bright the critics may be
counted upon to observe that real people never talk that way; but it
is better to beard the critics than to bore the audience. If I may add
to a line from "Clothes": "Hell and the stage drawing room are two
places where there are no stupid people."
It is no easy matter for the average playwright to reproduce the
atmosphere of Fifth Avenue. Many of the nabobs one glimpses in the
theatre fall about three hundred and sixty short of the "four
hundred." Every second comedy of manners we see is a comedy of very
bad manners. Men born with gold spoons in their mouths find it hard to
articulate, and few of our fashionable families produce dramatists who
"speak in a voice that fills the nation." Only the most successful of
the craft get an opportunity to study society at first hand. Perhaps
that is fortunate. "The drawback to realism", says Wilton Lackaye, "is
the fate of the realist. If he goes into the slums he becomes base; if
he goes into society he becomes soprano." The average social lion
being the sort of man one could push over, we ought to be glad of the
barrier between the pen, which only writes, and money, which talks.
Vigor and virility are more essential to good drama than absolutely
faithful atmosphere. All other things being equal, the individual who
would make the best pugilist would make the best playwright.
A good many of our society plays are marred by _gaucheries_ of a
serious nature. Glance over your mental list of tea-cup pieces. Clyde
Fitch, who rarely offended in this respect, had one woman giving
orders to the servants of another woman in "The Truth." Jack Neville,
in the Elsie de Wolfe performance of "The Way of the World", whistled
merrily while waiting in her parlor for his hostess. True, he didn't
whistle very noisily, but that palliation only makes one think of the
retort courteous supposed to have been made by a well-bred woman after
she had complained of a gentleman who whistled in her ball room. "It
was very low", plead the gentleman. "It _was_", answered the lady;
"_very_ low."
Cynthia, in the comedy of that name, received her husband while the
hairdresser and the manicure were employed with her. Dick Crawford, in
"Caught in the Rain", tips a servant in the home of his friend, Mr.
Mason. Everybody who visits Montgomery Brewster in the first act of
"Brewster's Millions" comments most vulgarly on that hero's newly
acquired wealth. Richard Burbank in "Clothes" mistakes Miss Sherwood's
piano for a hat rack, while that lady permits herself to be led away
from a dance without bidding farewell to her hostess. In "The House of
Mirth", a sandless-souled hero, named Lawrence Selden, literally
thrust himself past a protesting servant and into the rooms of
Augustus Trenor. The young woman impersonated by Edna May in "The
Catch of the Season" was given tiffen consisting of a hunk of bread an
inch thick and tea in a cup that bore all the ear-marks of belonging
to that family of unbreakable things that are used in the second cabin
of ocean liners. These, of course, are "trifles light as air", but
what shall be said of Charles Richman in dress clothes and light boots
in "Mrs. Dane's Defence", of Margaret Dale in decollette and walking
hat in "Delancy", and of Mrs. Fiske's laying her handkerchief on the
luncheon table in "Becky Sharp?" Above all, what shall be said of the
gentleman in "The Triangle" who stabbed his better half with a carving
knife at dinner. I may be ignorant of what I seek to teach and quite
wrong about these other _faux pas_, but _that_ certainly cannot be
condemned too forcibly. It simply isn't done!
"Popularity", George Cohan's play that afterward became "The Man Who
Owns Broadway", was a perfect mine of ill breeding. In the first
place, the Fuller drawing room, as shown, was a flaring red, with a
piano on which the manufacturer's name was painted in letters two
inches high. During the evening there were several callers, whom the
Fullers left quite alone for a period of fifteen minutes. The butler
atoned for this rudeness by shaking hands with one of the guests, a
young gentleman unfortunately crossed in love, and expressing sympathy
for him. The young gentleman said he was much obliged. The climax of
this singular exhibition was reached when a "matinee idol", dropping
in without invitation on Papa Fuller, whom he had never met, lit a
cigar, instructed the sympathetic butler to bring him spirituous
liquor, and told his host a few things about gentlemen in general and
the host himself in particular.
The familiarity of the butler in "Popularity" was as nothing to the
behavior of the servants in "Forty-five Minutes From Broadway", where
several menials seemed to subscribe heartily to Paul Blouet's dictum
that "America is a country in which every man is as good as his
neighbor and a damned sight better." The mother in the noisy farce of
"Julie Bonbon" who objected to having her son marry a milliner might
have improved her own manners in any millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. A
chambermaid in "Susan in Search of a Husband" introduced to each other
two guests of her hotel; Vida Phillimore in "The New York Idea"
received in her boudoir a nobleman who had been presented to her only
the day before; Mrs. O'Mara addressed her daughter and ignored the
visitor who was chatting with her in "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." The
reception room revealed in "The Daughters of Men" looked like the
interior of a jewel box, and served as the abiding place of a
wonderful collection of amusingly stiff-backed men and women,
representing the smart set as, at that time, it was imagined by
Charles Klein.
[Illustration: "_It simply isn't done!_"]
Fortunately, errors of taste in staging society plays become fewer and
less conspicuous every day. They are practically obsolete now in
theaters like the Empire, the Lyceum, the Hudson, and the Belasco.
With them has gone the time in which every fashionable apartment was
furnished in exactly the same way and had doors in exactly the same
place. The producer who "dresses" a stage today buys precisely as
though he had a commission to "dress" the home of a wealthy and
intelligent client. Under these circumstances, it is particularly
fortunate that the comedy of manners and the drama of the drawing room
have come to stay. Cultured people are pleasant companions in everyday
life, and doubly pleasant when they have been idealized and
super-refined for library or theater. We may be glad of the evident
fact that plays may come and plays may go, but the society play goes
on forever.
Transcriber's Note:
Archaic and inconsistent spelling retained.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Footlights Fore and Aft, by Channing Pollock