The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waiting is
only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every night
takes place. The audience are the players. Their audience on the stage
are bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipate them, and to
divine them. But once known and their character established in relation
to a particular play, the audience--what is called the audience--need
give no further trouble. They themselves cannot alter; they are fixed
and compelled by the tremendous force of averages. The most inexorable
of laws, and the most irresistible of necessities are upon them; they
cannot do otherwise; they are out of the reach of accidents; they are
made fast in their own mediocrity. They are a thousand London people;
and no genius, or no imbecility, amongst them has any effect upon that
secure sovereignty of a number.
The long laugh generally means that the house--by its unalterable
majority--has laughed at one joke three times. The stage waits upon the
audience, and the audience rehearses its collective and inevitable laugh.
It performs. It communicates itself, and art is a communication. A
small and chosen party is made up, behind the footlights, to see a
thousand people, given helpless into the hands of destiny and subject to
averages, so express themselves.
The audience's audience (the people on the stage) are persuaded into
applauding the laugh too long and too often. The author is, of course,
one of them, and he applauds by making too many such translations. They
are perhaps worth making, and even worth renewing in acknowledgement of a
smile; but it is surely to encourage the house unduly to make them so
important. The actors applaud their audience by repeating--and not once
or only twice--a piece of comic business. Does the Average laugh so well
as indeed to deserve all this?
The Average does little more than laugh. It knows that its own truest
talents are indubitably comic. We have no real tragic audiences. This
is no expression of regret over legitimate audiences, or audiences of the
old school, or any audiences of that kind, whose day may or may not have
had a date. It is a mere statement of the fact that audiences have lost,
or never had, a distinguishing perception of emotion, whereas they have
every kind of perception of humour, distinguishing and general. Their
laugh never fails. If their friends behind would really care to improve
them, it might be done by exacting from them a little more temperance in
their sense of comedy. We shall never have a really good school of
audience without the exercise of some such severity.
For obviously when we call an average unchangeable, we mean that it is
unchangeable for its time merely. There might be a slow upraising of the
level. It would still be a level, and there would still be a compelling
law upon one thousand that it should do the same thing as another
thousand; but that same thing might become somewhat more intelligent.
When a fine actor does a fine thing, have we such a school of audience as
to merit this admirable supply to their demands?--this applause of their
understanding? Is there not in the whole excellent piece of work,
something all too independent of their part in the theatre?
If Caligula wished that mankind had but one neck for his knife, and Byron
that all womankind had but one mouth for his kiss, so the audience has
conceived that all arts should have but one mystery for its blundering,
and thus thinks itself interested in acting when it does but admire the
actor as in a drawing.
The time may come when a national school of dramatic audience shall not
accept artifices that could not convince the fool amongst them; when one
brilliant moment of simplicity on the one side of the footlights shall
meet a brilliant simplicity on the other. Which troupe, which side, to
begin?