THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
To the preoccupied adult who is prone to use the city street as a mere
passageway from one hurried duty to another, nothing is more touching
than his encounter with a group of children and young people who are
emerging from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon
them. They look up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing
it and quite unable to determine the direction of home. From a tangle
of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the real world which they
are so reluctant to reënter, reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a
child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither the story
has completely transported him.
"Going to the show" for thousands of young people in every industrial
city is the only possible road to the realms of mystery and romance;
the theater is the only place where they can satisfy that craving for
a conception of life higher than that which the actual world offers
them. In a very real sense the drama and the drama alone performs for
them the office of art as is clearly revealed in their blundering
demand stated in many forms for "a play unlike life." The theater
becomes to them a "veritable house of dreams" infinitely more real
than the noisy streets and the crowded factories.
This first simple demand upon the theater for romance is closely
allied to one more complex which might be described as a search for
solace and distraction in those moments of first awakening from the
glamour of a youth's interpretation of life to the sterner realities
which are thrust upon his consciousness. These perceptions which
inevitably "close around" and imprison the spirit of youth are perhaps
never so grim as in the case of the wage-earning child. We can all
recall our own moments of revolt against life's actualities, our
reluctance to admit that all life was to be as unheroic and uneventful
as that which we saw about us, it was too unbearable that "this was
all there was" and we tried every possible avenue of escape. As we
made an effort to believe, in spite of what we saw, that life was
noble and harmonious, as we stubbornly clung to poesy in contradiction
to the testimony of our senses, so we see thousands of young people
thronging the theaters bent in their turn upon the same quest. The
drama provides a transition between the romantic conceptions which
they vainly struggle to keep intact and life's cruelties and
trivialities which they refuse to admit. A child whose imagination has
been cultivated is able to do this for himself through reading and
reverie, but for the overworked city youth of meager education,
perhaps nothing but the theater is able to perform this important
office.
The theater also has a strange power to forecast life for the youth.
Each boy comes from our ancestral past not "in entire forgetfulness,"
and quite as he unconsciously uses ancient war-cries in his street
play, so he longs to reproduce and to see set before him the valors
and vengeances of a society embodying a much more primitive state of
morality than that in which he finds himself. Mr. Patten has pointed
out that the elemental action which the stage presents, the old
emotions of love and jealousy, of revenge and daring take the thoughts
of the spectator back into deep and well worn channels in which his
mind runs with a sense of rest afforded by nothing else. The cheap
drama brings cause and effect, will power and action, once more into
relation and gives a man the thrilling conviction that he may yet be
master of his fate. The youth of course, quite unconscious of this
psychology, views the deeds of the hero simply as a forecast of his
own future and it is this fascinating view of his own career which
draws the boy to "shows" of all sorts. They can scarcely be too
improbable for him, portraying, as they do, his belief in his own
prowess. A series of slides which has lately been very popular in the
five-cent theaters of Chicago, portrayed five masked men breaking into
a humble dwelling, killing the father of the family and carrying away
the family treasure. The golden-haired son of the house, aged seven,
vows eternal vengeance on the spot, and follows one villain after
another to his doom. The execution of each is shown in lurid detail,
and the last slide of the series depicts the hero, aged ten, kneeling
upon his father's grave counting on the fingers of one hand the number
of men that he has killed, and thanking God that he has been permitted
to be an instrument of vengeance.
In another series of slides, a poor woman is wearily bending over some
sewing, a baby is crying in the cradle, and two little boys of nine
and ten are asking for food. In despair the mother sends them out into
the street to beg, but instead they steal a revolver from a pawn shop
and with it kill a Chinese laundry-man, robbing him of $200. They rush
home with the treasure which is found by the mother in the baby's
cradle, whereupon she and her sons fall upon their knees and send up a
prayer of thankfulness for this timely and heaven-sent assistance.
Is it not astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill
their impressionable minds with these absurdities which certainly will
become the foundation for their working moral codes and the data from
which they will judge the proprieties of life?
It is as if a child, starved at home, should be forced to go out and
search for food, selecting, quite naturally, not that which is
nourishing but that which is exciting and appealing to his outward
sense, often in his ignorance and foolishness blundering into
substances which are filthy and poisonous.
Out of my twenty years' experience at Hull-House I can recall all
sorts of pilferings, petty larcenies, and even burglaries, due to that
never ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure theater tickets. I
can also recall indirect efforts towards the same end which are most
pitiful. I remember the remorse of a young girl of fifteen who was
brought into the Juvenile Court after a night spent weeping in the
cellar of her home because she had stolen a mass of artificial flowers
with which to trim a hat. She stated that she had taken the flowers
because she was afraid of losing the attention of a young man whom she
had heard say that "a girl has to be dressy if she expects to be
seen." This young man was the only one who had ever taken her to the
theater and if he failed her, she was sure that she would never go
again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she "couldn't live at all
without it." Apparently the blankness and grayness of life itself had
been broken for her only by the portrayal of a different world.
One boy whom I had known from babyhood began to take money from his
mother from the time he was seven years old, and after he was ten she
regularly gave him money for the play Saturday evening. However, the
Saturday performance, "starting him off like," he always went twice
again on Sunday, procuring the money in all sorts of illicit ways.
Practically all of his earnings after he was fourteen were spent in
this way to satisfy the insatiable desire to know of the great
adventures of the wide world which the more fortunate boy takes out in
reading Homer and Stevenson.
In talking with his mother, I was reminded of my experience one Sunday
afternoon in Russia when the employees of a large factory were seated
in an open-air theater, watching with breathless interest the
presentation of folk stories. I was told that troupes of actors went
from one manufacturing establishment to another presenting the simple
elements of history and literature to the illiterate employees. This
tendency to slake the thirst for adventure by viewing the drama is, of
course, but a blind and primitive effort in the direction of culture,
for "he who makes himself its vessel and bearer thereby acquires a
freedom from the blindness and soul poverty of daily existence."
It is partly in response to this need that more sophisticated young
people often go to the theater, hoping to find a clue to life's
perplexities. Many times the bewildered hero reminds one of Emerson's
description of Margaret Fuller, "I don't know where I am going, follow
me"; nevertheless, the stage is dealing with the moral themes in which
the public is most interested.
And while many young people go to the theater if only to see
represented, and to hear discussed, the themes which seem to them so
tragically important, there is no doubt that what they hear there,
flimsy and poor as it often is, easily becomes their actual moral
guide. In moments of moral crisis they turn to the sayings of the
hero who found himself in a similar plight. The sayings may not be
profound, but at least they are applicable to conduct. In the last few
years scores of plays have been put upon the stage whose titles might
be easily translated into proper headings for sociological lectures or
sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Hauptmann,
which deal so directly with moral issues that the moralists themselves
wince under their teachings and declare them brutal. But it is this
very brutality which the over-refined and complicated city dwellers
often crave. Moral teaching has become so intricate, creeds so
metaphysical, that in a state of absolute reaction they demand
definite instruction for daily living. Their whole-hearted acceptance
of the teaching corroborates the statement recently made by an English
playwright that "The theater is literally making the minds of our
urban populations to-day. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of
character, of points of honor, of conceptions of conduct, of
everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation. The
theater is not only a place of amusement, it is a place of culture, a
place where people learn how to think, act, and feel." Seldom,
however, do we associate the theater with our plans for civic
righteousness, although it has become so important a factor in city
life.
One Sunday evening last winter an investigation was made of four
hundred and sixty six theaters in the city of Chicago, and it was
discovered that in the majority of them the leading theme was revenge;
the lover following his rival; the outraged husband seeking his wife's
paramour; or the wiping out by death of a blot on a hitherto unstained
honor. It was estimated that one sixth of the entire population of the
city had attended the theaters on that day. At that same moment the
churches throughout the city were preaching the gospel of good will.
Is not this a striking commentary upon the contradictory influences to
which the city youth is constantly subjected?
This discrepancy between the church and the stage is at times
apparently recognized by the five-cent theater itself, and a
blundering attempt is made to suffuse the songs and moving pictures
with piety. Nothing could more absurdly demonstrate this attempt than
a song, illustrated by pictures, describing the adventures of a young
man who follows a pretty girl through street after street in the hope
of "snatching a kiss from her ruby lips." The young man is overjoyed
when a sudden wind storm drives the girl to shelter under an archway,
and he is about to succeed in his attempt when the good Lord, "ever
watchful over innocence," makes the same wind "blow a cloud of dust
into the eyes of the rubberneck," and "his foul purpose is foiled."
This attempt at piety is also shown in a series of films depicting
Bible stories and the Passion Play at Oberammergau, forecasting the
time when the moving film will be viewed as a mere mechanical device
for the use of the church, the school and the library, as well as for
the theater.
At present, however, most improbable tales hold the attention of the
youth of the city night after night, and feed his starved imagination
as nothing else succeeds in doing. In addition to these fascinations,
the five-cent theater is also fast becoming the general social center
and club house in many crowded neighborhoods. It is easy of access
from the street the entire family of parents and children can attend
for a comparatively small sum of money and the performance lasts for
at least an hour; and, in some of the humbler theaters, the spectators
are not disturbed for a second hour.
The room which contains the mimic stage is small and cozy, and less
formal than the regular theater, and there is much more gossip and
social life as if the foyer and pit were mingled. The very darkness of
the room, necessary for an exhibition of the films, is an added
attraction to many young people, for whom the space is filled with the
glamour of love making.
Hundreds of young people attend these five-cent theaters every evening
in the week, including Sunday, and what is seen and heard there
becomes the sole topic of conversation, forming the ground pattern of
their social life. That mutual understanding which in another social
circle is provided by books, travel and all the arts, is here
compressed into the topics suggested by the play.
The young people attend the five-cent theaters in groups, with
something of the "gang" instinct, boasting of the films and stunts in
"our theater." They find a certain advantage in attending one theater
regularly, for the _habitués_ are often invited to come upon the stage
on "amateur nights," which occur at least once a week in all the
theaters. This is, of course, a most exciting experience. If the
"stunt" does not meet with the approval of the audience, the performer
is greeted with jeers and a long hook pulls him off the stage; if, on
the other hand, he succeeds in pleasing the audience, he may be paid
for his performance and later register with a booking agency, the
address of which is supplied by the obliging manager, and thus he
fancies that a lucrative and exciting career is opening before him.
Almost every night at six o'clock a long line of children may be seen
waiting at the entrance of these booking agencies, of which there are
fifteen that are well known in Chicago.
Thus, the only art which is constantly placed before the eyes of "the
temperamental youth" is a debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar
type of music, for the success of a song in these theaters depends not
so much upon its musical rendition as upon the vulgarity of its
appeal. In a song which held the stage of a cheap theater in Chicago
for weeks, the young singer was helped out by a bit of mirror from
which she threw a flash of light into the faces of successive boys
whom she selected from the audience as she sang the refrain, "You are
my Affinity." Many popular songs relate the vulgar experiences of a
city man wandering from amusement park to bathing beach in search of
flirtations. It may be that these "stunts" and recitals of city
adventure contain the nucleus of coming poesy and romance, as the
songs and recitals of the early minstrels sprang directly from the
life of the people, but all the more does the effort need help and
direction, both in the development of its technique and the material
of its themes.
The few attempts which have been made in this direction are
astonishingly rewarding to those who regard the power of
self-expression as one of the most precious boons of education. The
Children's Theater in New York is the most successful example, but
every settlement in which dramatics have been systematically fostered
can also testify to a surprisingly quick response to this form of art
on the part of young people. The Hull-House Theater is constantly
besieged by children clamoring to "take part" in the plays of
Schiller, Shakespeare, and Molière, although they know it means weeks
of rehearsal and the complete memorizing of "stiff" lines. The
audiences sit enthralled by the final rendition and other children
whose tastes have supposedly been debased by constant vaudeville, are
pathetically eager to come again and again. Even when still more is
required from the young actors, research into the special historic
period, copying costumes from old plates, hours of labor that the "th"
may be restored to its proper place in English speech, their
enthusiasm is unquenched. But quite aside from its educational
possibilities one never ceases to marvel at the power of even a mimic
stage to afford to the young a magic space in which life may be lived
in efflorescence, where manners may be courtly and elaborate without
exciting ridicule, where the sequence of events is impressive and
comprehensible. Order and beauty of life is what the adolescent youth
craves above all else as the younger child indefatigably demands his
story. "Is this where the most beautiful princess in the world lives?"
asks a little girl peering into the door of the Hull-House Theater, or
"Does Alice in Wonderland always stay here?" It is much easier for her
to put her feeling into words than it is for the youth who has
enchantingly rendered the gentle poetry of Ben Jonson's "Sad
Shepherd," or for him who has walked the boards as Southey's Wat
Tyler. His association, however, is quite as clinging and magical as
is the child's although he can only say, "Gee, I wish I could always
feel the way I did that night. Something would be doing then." Nothing
of the artist's pleasure, nor of the revelation of that larger world
which surrounds and completes our own, is lost to him because a
careful technique has been exacted,--on the contrary this has only
dignified and enhanced it. It would also be easy to illustrate youth's
eagerness for artistic expression from the recitals given by the
pupils of the New York Music School Settlement, or by those of the
Hull-House Music School. These attempts also combine social life with
the training of the artistic sense and in this approximate the
fascinations of the five-cent theater.
This spring a group of young girls accustomed to the life of a
five-cent theater, reluctantly refused an invitation to go to the
country for a day's outing because the return on a late train would
compel them to miss one evening's performance. They found it
impossible to tear themselves away not only from the excitements of
the theater itself but from the gaiety of the crowd of young men and
girls invariably gathered outside discussing the sensational posters.
A steady English shopkeeper lately complained that unless he provided
his four, daughters with the money for the five-cent theaters every
evening they would steal it from his till, and he feared that they
might be driven to procure it in even more illicit ways. Because his
entire family life had been thus disrupted he gloomily asserted that
"this cheap show had ruined his 'ome and was the curse of America."
This father was able to formulate the anxiety of many immigrant
parents who are absolutely bewildered by the keen absorption of their
children in the cheap theater. This anxiety is not, indeed, without
foundation. An eminent alienist of Chicago states that he has had a
number of patients among neurotic children whose emotional natures
have been so over-wrought by the crude appeal to which they had been
so constantly subjected in the theaters, that they have become victims
of hallucination and mental disorder. The statement of this physician
may be the first note of alarm which will awaken the city to its duty
in regard to the theater, so that it shall at least be made safe and
sane for the city child whose senses are already so abnormally
developed.
This testimony of a physician that the conditions are actually
pathological, may at last induce us to bestir ourselves in regard to
procuring a more wholesome form of public recreation. Many efforts in
social amelioration have been undertaken only after such exposures; in
the meantime, while the occasional child is driven distraught, a
hundred children permanently injure their eyes watching the moving
films, and hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the
standards set before them on this mimic stage.
Three boys, aged nine, eleven and thirteen years, who had recently
seen depicted the adventures of frontier life including the holding up
of a stage coach and the lassoing of the driver, spent weeks planning
to lasso, murder, and rob a neighborhood milkman, who started on his
route at four o'clock in the morning. They made their headquarters in
a barn and saved enough money to buy a revolver, adopting as their
watchword the phrase "Dead Men Tell no Tales." One spring morning the
conspirators, with their faces covered with black cloth, lay "in
ambush" for the milkman. Fortunately for him, as the lariat was thrown
the horse shied, and, although the shot was appropriately fired, the
milkman's life was saved. Such a direct influence of the theater is by
no means rare, even among older boys. Thirteen young lads were brought
into the Municipal Court in Chicago during the first week that
"Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman" was upon the stage, each one with an
outfit of burglar's tools in his possession, and each one shamefacedly
admitting that the gentlemanly burglar in the play had suggested to
him a career of similar adventure.
In so far as the illusions of the theater succeed in giving youth the
rest and recreation which comes from following a more primitive code
of morality, it has a close relation to the function performed by
public games. It is, of course, less valuable because the sense of
participation is largely confined to the emotions and the imagination,
and does not involve the entire nature.
We might illustrate by the "Wild West Show" in which the onlooking boy
imagines himself an active participant. The scouts, the Indians, the
bucking ponies, are his real intimate companions and occupy his entire
mind. In contrast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag which
is, doubtless, also founded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise
and momentary echoes of the old excitement, but it is barren of
suggestion and quickly degenerates into horse-play.
Well considered public games easily carried out in a park or athletic
field, might both fill the mind with the imaginative material
constantly supplied by the theater, and also afford the activity which
the cramped muscles of the town dweller so sorely need. Even the
unquestioned ability which the theater possesses to bring men together
into a common mood and to afford them a mutual topic of conversation,
is better accomplished with the one national game which we already
possess, and might be infinitely extended through the organization of
other public games.
The theater even now by no means competes with the baseball league
games which are attended by thousands of men and boys who, during the
entire summer, discuss the respective standing of each nine and the
relative merits of every player. During the noon hour all the
employees of a city factory gather in the nearest vacant lot to cheer
their own home team in its practice for the next game with the nine of
a neighboring manufacturing establishment and on a Saturday afternoon
the entire male population of the city betakes itself to the baseball
field; the ordinary means of transportation are supplemented by gay
stage-coaches and huge automobiles, noisy with blowing horns and
decked with gay pennants. The enormous crowd of cheering men and boys
are talkative, good-natured, full of the holiday spirit, and
absolutely released from the grind of life. They are lifted out of
their individual affairs and so fused together that a man cannot tell
whether it is his own shout or another's that fills his ears; whether
it is his own coat or another's that he is wildly waving to celebrate
a victory. He does not call the stranger who sits next to him his
"brother" but he unconsciously embraces him in an overwhelming
outburst of kindly feeling when the favorite player makes a home run.
Does not this contain a suggestion of the undoubted power of public
recreation to bring together all classes of a community in the modern
city unhappily so full of devices for keeping men apart?
Already some American cities are making a beginning toward more
adequate public recreation. Boston has its municipal gymnasiums,
cricket fields, and golf grounds. Chicago has seventeen parks with
playing fields, gymnasiums and baths, which at present enroll
thousands of young people. These same parks are provided with
beautiful halls which are used for many purposes, rent free, and are
given over to any group of young people who wish to conduct dancing
parties subject to city supervision and chaperonage. Many social clubs
have deserted neighboring saloon halls for these municipal drawing
rooms beautifully decorated with growing plants supplied by the park
greenhouses, and flooded with electric lights supplied by the park
power house. In the saloon halls the young people were obliged to
"pass money freely over the bar," and in order to make the most of the
occasion they usually stayed until morning. At such times the economic
necessity itself would override the counsels of the more temperate,
and the thrifty door keeper would not insist upon invitations but
would take in any one who had the "price of a ticket." The free rent
in the park hall, the good food in the park restaurant, supplied at
cost, have made three parties closing at eleven o'clock no more
expensive than one party breaking up at daylight, too often in
disorder.
Is not this an argument that the drinking, the late hours, the lack of
decorum, are directly traceable to the commercial enterprise which
ministers to pleasure in order to drag it into excess because excess
is more profitable? To thus commercialize pleasure is as monstrous as
it is to commercialize art. It is intolerable that the city does not
take over this function of making provision for pleasure, as wise
communities in Sweden and South Carolina have taken the sale of
alcohol out of the hands of enterprising publicans.
We are only beginning to understand what might be done through the
festival, the street procession, the band of marching musicians,
orchestral music in public squares or parks, with the magic power they
all possess to formulate the sense of companionship and solidarity.
The experiments which are being made in public schools to celebrate
the national holidays, the changing seasons, the birthdays of heroes,
the planting of trees, are slowly developing little ceremonials which
may in time work out into pageants of genuine beauty and significance.
No other nation has so unparalleled an opportunity to do this through
its schools as we have, for no other nation has so wide-spreading a
school system, while the enthusiasm of children and their natural
ability to express their emotions through symbols, gives the securest
possible foundation to this growing effort.
The city schools of New York have effected the organization of high
school girls into groups for folk dancing. These old forms of dancing
which have been worked out in many lands and through long experiences,
safeguard unwary and dangerous expression and yet afford a vehicle
through which the gaiety of youth may flow. Their forms are indeed
those which lie at the basis of all good breeding, forms which at once
express and restrain, urge forward and set limits.
One may also see another center of growth for public recreation and
the beginning of a pageantry for the people in the many small parks
and athletic fields which almost every American city is hastening to
provide for its young. These small parks have innumerable athletic
teams, each with its distinctive uniform, with track meets and match
games arranged with the teams from other parks and from the public
schools; choruses of trade unionists or of patriotic societies fill
the park halls with eager listeners. Labor Day processions are yearly
becoming more carefully planned and more picturesque in character, as
the desire to make an overwhelming impression with mere size gives way
to a growing ambition to set forth the significance of the craft and
the skill of the workman. At moments they almost rival the dignified
showing of the processions of the German Turn Vereins which are also
often seen in our city streets.
The many foreign colonies which are found in all American cities
afford an enormous reserve of material for public recreation and
street festival. They not only celebrate the feasts and holidays of
the fatherland, but have each their own public expression for their
mutual benefit societies and for the observance of American
anniversaries. From the gay celebration of the Scandinavians when war
was averted and two neighboring nations were united, to the equally
gay celebration of the centenary of Garibaldi's birth; from the
Chinese dragon cleverly trailing its way through the streets, to the
Greek banners flung out in honor of immortal heroes, there is an
infinite variety of suggestions and possibilities for public
recreation and for the corporate expression of stirring emotions.
After all, what is the function of art but to preserve in permanent
and beautiful form those emotions and solaces which cheer life and
make it kindlier, more heroic and easier to comprehend; which lift the
mind of the worker from the harshness and loneliness of his task, and,
by connecting him with what has gone before, free him from a sense of
isolation and hardship?
Were American cities really eager for municipal art, they would
cherish as genuine beginnings the tarentella danced so interminably at
Italian weddings; the primitive Greek pipe played throughout the long
summer nights; the Bohemian theaters crowded with eager Slavophiles;
the Hungarian musicians strolling from street to street; the fervid
oratory of the young Russian preaching social righteousness in the
open square.
Many Chicago citizens who attended the first annual meeting of the
National Playground Association of America, will never forget the long
summer day in the large playing field filled during the morning with
hundreds of little children romping through the kindergarten games, in
the afternoon with the young men and girls contending in athletic
sports; and the evening light made gay by the bright colored garments
of Italians, Lithuanians, Norwegians, and a dozen other nationalities,
reproducing their old dances and festivals for the pleasure of the
more stolid Americans. Was this a forecast of what we may yet see
accomplished through a dozen agencies promoting public recreation
which are springing up in every city of America, as they already are
found in the large towns of Scotland and England?
Let us cherish these experiments as the most precious beginnings of an
attempt to supply the recreational needs of our industrial cities. To
fail to provide for the recreation of youth, is not only to deprive
all of them of their natural form of expression, but is certain to
subject some of them to the overwhelming temptation of illicit and
soul-destroying pleasures. To insist that young people shall forecast
their rose-colored future only in a house of dreams, is to deprive the
real world of that warmth and reassurance which it so sorely needs and
to which it is justly entitled; furthermore, we are left outside with
a sense of dreariness, in company with that shadow which already lurks
only around the corner for most of us--a skepticism of life's value.