PLAYGROUNDS
It is strange that the theatre should matter in a nation such as
ours, which has gained a reputation for liberalism and tolerance,
being tolerant because it cared for nothing, and liberal because it
understood little. The vogue of the theatre reflects the character of
urban England, which is as frivolous as that of urban Italy is dour;
because it is the symbol of pleasure, easily attained and still more
easily digested, it can always find room in the newspaper, where the
affairs of the nation flicker and the claims of art are unmet. For let
there be no confusion: art and the theatre are not the same thing;
almost one might say that if a play possesses artistic quality it holds
a passport to eternity, with this difference, that many things lost in
eternity are remembered. A little more may be said of this further on.
London has always been a city of theatres, perhaps because we have, for
many centuries, laboured under the Puritan tradition: its bitterness
has attached to the theatre a glamour foreign to it in hotter lands.
When you open a book of memoirs by an Italian, a German, or a Russian,
you may be sure that it will consist in portraits of politicians,
biographies of cocottes, stories of riots and coronations, but if at
Hatchards you peer into any volume called _My Life_, or something like
that, you will almost invariably discover that the greater part of the
author’s life seems to have been employed in meeting Sir Henry Irving,
or waiting outside the Adelphi on first nights. The theatre, you see,
is wicked and winning; the most august of the augustine, Messrs Coutts
and Co., stamp upon their cheques their old sign: ‘At the “Three
Crowns” in the Strand, next door to the Globe Theatre, A.D. 1692.’ I
will wager those three crowns that no bank manager would ever think of
advertising on his cheques: ‘Next door to Westminster Abbey.’ Why this
should be is not entirely explained by the Puritan tradition, and it is
still less explained by the London theatres themselves, nearly all of
them, the meanest, dirtiest, dingiest, fustiest, frowstiest edifices
in the country. This is true, whether you pass from Drury Lane, that
cave of winds, to ‘behind,’ at the Kingsway, where the oldest rabbit
would get lost. Indeed, our theatres must have been influenced by the
Puritan tradition, for everything has been done to hide their addresses
in the papers, to make their doors invisible, their seating suitable
for a Christian martyr. There is not in London a pre-Boer War theatre
the pit of which is not summed up by Rutland Barrington’s song: ‘You
bark your shins, you bang your head, your knees are up to your nose in
bed ...’ and so on. They are so arranged that people delicately place
their feet in the small of your back, so that nobody can enter the
middle of a row without disturbing it, or leave it without infuriating
it; as for the rakes, in spite of the matinée hat, I suspect that they
have been planned to encourage expensive transfers. Of course, the
worst theatres are those which are known as the ‘good old’ ones. There
is no such thing as good old. There is nothing but bad old, and the
theatre is an example. It must have been that heathen god, Good Old,
invented Covent Garden. Good Old got it up in red and gold (Good Old
would); Good Old planned the slips, which on one side let you hear all
the strings and on the other all the brass. Good Old says it is cheap
for half a crown. Good Old planned Drury Lane and laid it down where
no buses pass. And, no doubt, Good Old handed over what was then Her
Majesty’s Theatre to Shakespeare as dramatised by Beerbohm Tree.
Some of the old London theatres, it is true, are a little less
repulsive because they are not quite so large. Thus, the Haymarket, the
Royalty, and in a queer, insidious way old Sadler’s Wells. Sadler’s
Wells has gone; there to-day upon the film cowboys race and rescue,
and negroid heroines register their emotions, but not long ago it was
one of the few pleasant places Good Old had bequeathed us, with its
hemicycle of plush-backed stalls, its little boxes lined with an inch
of lush and half an inch of dirt, its heavy red hangings, favourable to
lovers, its preposterous plays of love, gold, faith, patriotism, and
banana falls. You see, at Sadler’s Wells, Good Old dated back to about
1780, while at most of our theatres he has brought himself up to date,
say to 1860, and has grown respectable; it has not agreed with him.
When we consider the few new theatres that have been built, such as the
Scala, the Little Theatre, the Ambassadors, we are sure that the old
cannot be brought up to date. Like most old institutions, the English
theatre can be reformed only by dynamite.
As in many human things, architecture is at fault. The playhouse is
evolved from the Roman circus. But the circus offered a performance
without scenery, which could be seen from all sides. When scenery came,
it grew impossible to show the play except from one side, so as not to
give away the mystery; thus we obtained the semi-circular auditorium,
which would be quite satisfactory if it did not result in a perpetually
partial view for one half of the audience. The old play was mainly
pantomimic; when the play grew more articulate it became impossible to
hear the words very far, and as the theatre could not spread outwards
it spread upwards. Then chaos came, for rakes had to be so arranged as
to enable people to see, and yet packed close under another tier. The
result is sardines.
Indeed, when we consider what it labours against, it is remarkable
that the theatre should be so healthy. Every year, well over half the
plays that are put on enjoy less than six weeks’ run, and if it were
not notorious that bankruptcy is a profitable trade one would wonder
how managers live. The managers seem to have done everything to achieve
financial suicide. Especially during the last twenty years; notably
stimulated by Mr Charles Frohman and Mr George Edwardes, they have
indulged in an endless competition in expensive staging. It grew quite
common for a play to cost £5000 to stage, and much more was spent
sometimes. Now, that large sum was risked, not invested, and so the
unfortunate manager had to pay his backers a heavy toll. I am sure
he was entirely wrong, for audiences prefer plays to scenery, and Mr
Cochran, one of the few managers who remembers that once upon a time
he was a public, has proved this by staging a successful revue for
about £150. Do not believe that I am a highbrow; I do not suggest that
_A Little Bit of Fluff_ should be staged without scenery, but with
curtains (though there is a lot in curtains, if discreetly drawn), but
I do suggest that the more elaborate the scenery, the more the play is
overlooked. Perhaps that is what the managers desire, and judging from
the condition of modern drama, perhaps they are right. But I attribute
to the managers no such profundities of psychology. Rather would I say
that they know what the public wants, and one thing they know well: the
public wants certain actors and wants them passionately.
I shall never forget a certain performance of _King Henry V._ There
entered a man in silver armour, his visor down, and a gasping female
by my side said: ‘That’s Lewis Waller.’ And the worst of it is that
she was right, and that I knew she was right. Visor or no visor, I too
knew it was Lewis Waller; it was Lewis Waller, slamming and banging
British drama as none better could than he, by insisting, in his silver
armour, on being always Waller, never Henry V. They are all like that:
Mr Gerald du Maurier may dress himself up as a policeman, or swathe
his neck in a choker, or get into evening clothes and pretend to be a
burglar, but thick over those artifices lies always the charming du
Maurier trail. He is loved for that, just as Beerbohm Tree was loved
for the confectionery of his voice and the circular movement of his
hand, as Mr Hawtrey is loved for his sober cynicism, and Miss Doris
Keane for ... I don’t know exactly what. Whatever actors are loved for,
it is always for being themselves and never for being their parts;
whether, like Miss Lilian Braithwaite, they have cast themselves for
the lilies and languors of virtue, or, like Miss Dorothy Minto, for
the roses and raptures of vice, to those selections they must cleave,
or they shall be loved no more. But if they do cleave to these selves
of theirs, then shall they attain fame, and the public will not say:
‘Have you been to _Hamlet_?’ but ‘Have you seen Martin Harvey?’ And
this worship shapes yet another stone to hurl at the English theatre,
namely, fantastic salaries, varying between £100 and £300 a week. Call
me a Bolshevik if you like, but I say no man is worth £300 a week;
nobody knows this when the man is alive, but everybody does the day
after he is dead. This would not matter if it did not make the theatre
so expensive to run, therefore the prices of the seats so high that
only those who can afford it sit in them. The richer the staging, the
poorer the play; the dearer the seat, the greater its attraction to the
people who know ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ For
long purses are made of sows’ ears.
I wonder if something could be done for the theatre. Supposing it
were built like the Scala, so that nobody sat at the sides, so that
everybody might see the play instead of hats, so that one might have
a fit in the stalls and be removed without causing too much trouble
(you see, I think of everything), so that the people at the top were
not seated so high as to observe mainly the actors’ upper skulls.
Supposing a theatre like the Munich Kammerspiele, which holds five
hundred, were to be built. Supposing, like that one, it had but one
balcony; supposing it were cheap to light; supposing, too, that it had
no programme sellers, but delivered programmes at the doors from a
penny-in-the-slot machine; supposing it had no cloak-room attendants,
but hooks with a number and a padlock; supposing it had no ... I forget
the name of the attendant, something like pew-opener, and that the
seats were not numbered from A.26 to M.34 in the stalls, not numbered
at all in the pit, and re-numbered again in the upper circle; supposing
the seats were just numbered 1, 2, 3, so that one could find them;
supposing we paid actors for rehearsals and engaged them for a certain
term; supposing all this, would the public be pleased? I wonder! I
wonder whether the public would like paying less for its seats. If
stalls did not cost 10s. 6d., would it trust the play? It certainly
does not trust the doctor who charges less than 10s. 6d. And yet, once
upon a time, the theatre was cheap. When, sixty years ago, Ben Webster
was producing at the Adelphi, a stall cost 5s., and Mr Webster offered
amphitheatre stalls ‘with elbows and cushions, secured the whole
evening’ for 1s.
Yes, a good deal might be done like this. A good deal might be done by
the Lord Chamberlain and the London County Council, if only they would
cease to devote all their thoughts to exits from the theatre. (On
consideration, this may be well advised.) They might allow smoking, and
best of all, they might allow everything, suspend all censorship, and
be assured that the plays which are called objectionable would not be
staged. I do not mean that there is no demand for objectionable plays;
there is; indeed, we nearly all of us like objectionable plays, but the
Puritans can trust our Puritan feeling, which makes it impossible for
us to enjoy objectionable plays because we dare not be seen enjoying
them by other people who are also enjoying them. Ah! if you could go to
the play masked it would be different.
What is wrong with the drama is that it does not hold an idea to the
square act; is it worth saving? For it may truly be said that the
only fault the public finds in a stupid play is that it is not stupid
enough. You do not believe me. Let us look at the list of plays in
to-day’s paper. To-day there are open thirty-six metropolitan theatres,
including some we can leave out, Maskelyne’s, Drury Lane (Opera), the
Philharmonic. Of the remaining thirty-three, musical comedy occupies
six stages. Say no more about that. If it were not for the lips that
sing, our attention would be concentrated on English music. Revue rages
at five theatres. This leaves twenty-two plays running. Among them are
two spy plays, two comic war plays, a mystical melodrama, four farces;
the rest consists in plays made by hands unassisted by heads, plays
that the next generation may make by machinery. The groans of old age
are heard as Sir Arthur Pinero rigs _The Freaks_ upon their legs, as Mr
Somerset Maugham presents _Love in a Cottage_. And _Dear Brutus_ is the
twinkling star that makes darker the Thalian night.
In hardly one of these plays is there a single moment of intellectual
distinction. I do not mean that I ask those twenty-two stages to make
up the night’s programme of _King Lear_, _Ghosts_, _Les Trois Filles
de Monsieur Dupont_, the _Sunken Bell_, _The Knight of the Burning
Pestle_, but I do think that their coalition might give us more than
_Dear Brutus_. There should be plenty of room for true comedy of the
type of _The Admirable Crichton_, _Mrs Gorringe’s Necklace_, _John
Bull’s Other Island_, _The Cassilis Engagement_, _Chains_, comedy with
ideas. There should be room for _The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnett_,
_The Playboy of the Western World_ and other solid plays. But one
condition is that we should pay for plays, not players. We do not. If
you want evidence consider the following advertisement of _When Knights
were Bold_ (a really amusing play):--
WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD.
BROMLEY ‘Bromley Challenor has a personality and fun of his
CHALLENOR own.’--_Times._
‘An individual style of his own.’--_Daily Telegraph._
‘A manner quite his own.’--_The Queen._
‘Nothing funnier than the second act.’--_Daily Telegraph._
‘His fun is infectious.’--_Daily Graphic._
‘Keeps his audience in convulsions.’--_Star._
‘Had a triumphant reception.’--_Daily Chronicle._
‘Bromley Challenor extracts every spark of fun.’--J. T.
GREIN, _Sunday Times_.
‘The play went more gloriously than ever.’--_Referee._
MARJORIE ‘Miss Marjorie Bellairs is a charming actress with a
BELLAIRS singularly sweet voice.’--_Era._
Ten press quotations. Two refer to the play; one may refer to play
or to actor; seven refer to the actor only. (The playwright is not
mentioned, but never mind). This does not mean that the newspapers
confined their notices to Mr Bromley Challenor, but it does mean that
the management selected for quotation only the phrases which refer to
the actor, because that is what the public wants, and what it gets for
the hastening of its mental decay.
What is wrong with the theatre is, to a certain extent, right with the
music-hall, and this for two reasons: we have to deal with a different
kind of playgoer, and the excessive valuation of the actor is sharply
limited by the worth of his songs. I have seen Ernie Mayne, Ella
Shields, and others rouse the house with one song and half-fail with
another. The theatre-goer, who, on the whole, is not a music-hall-goer,
is usually either in a smug condition, or over-conscious of his
digestive process. Nearly all the pit and upper circle, and the bulk of
the dress circle, feel that they are indulging in a respectable spree.
Leaving aside the one who, in the newspapers, signs his letters as ‘Old
Playgoer’ (generally an old fool), or ‘Old Firstnighter,’ probably an
old lunatic (because the first night is the worst night), the cheaper
seats in a theatre are tenanted mainly by people in a stupefied state
of admiration. They have escaped for a few hours from the dug-outs of
respectability; their families have not long emerged from the tradition
that the theatre is a place of evil repute; some even believe that they
are improving their minds, which is touching, whatever the condition
of their minds. They file their programmes. They loudly proclaim to
their friends that they ‘ought’ to go and see such and such a play.
Perhaps they go because they ought to. Perhaps they go to dream dreams;
no doubt nightmares do not disappoint them. The stalls are not in
search of virtue tempered with a little vice; most of their patrons
are confessedly in search of vice neat. They never get it. And if this
vice, invisible to anybody who is not a bishop or the editor of a
Sunday paper, is necessary to their health, it is because they visit
the theatre in a state of advanced repletion, because they are people
who manage to be replete in the middle of a European war; such is their
nature. No wonder, then, that the cold suet of the drama should have so
securely become wrapped in the wet dish-cloth of the playgoer. Thus, it
may be true to say that the playgoer gets the plays he deserves. The
music-hall-goer is different.
If it is true that many go to the theatre when they have eaten too
much, it is, to a certain extent, true that many go to the music-hall
when they have drunk too much, which, if I must choose, is less
repulsive. They are frankly out for a rag; they want to laugh,
and I had rather they guffawed than drowsed. You can’t drowse in a
music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, in his elaborately
luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, addresses his first and
infinitely disabused bow to the audience, to the time when he calls
upon the band to produce the smallest possible scrap of ‘God Save
the King,’ and hurries out loyalty on the wings of ragtime, there is
no flagging. It is not only that red-nosed comedian and eccentric
comedienne, American dancer, or sketch got up regardless, tread upon
each other’s heels; the main thing is the band, the harsh, rapid band,
that never stops, that plays anything, providing it is the thing of the
day, with all the regularity and indifference of the typewriter. From
it gush patriotism, comedy or sentiment, and all three burst forth with
their full headline value. There is no tickling of big drums; when the
drum is banged you know it; nor is there measure in the sigh of the
oboe, for the music-hall paints not in wash-greens and grays; scarlet,
black, white, and electric-blue are its gamut.
Nothing else would satisfy the audience that every music-hall comedian
must encounter every night. It is a mixed audience. There are old
stagers who sit in the same seat every Saturday night, without looking
at the programme, and this differentiates them from the playgoer: they
are bound for a playground. There are the discriminating who follow the
star, so long as the star’s songs refrain from appealing to what is
described as their better feelings; there are the very young in search
of excitement, and determined to get it; there are the slightly older,
who come in pairs, and do nothing to conceal the fact. (Of late years,
many of these have been lost to the music-halls and have taken to the
cinemas because they are darker.) But one thing unites them all: they
have come here to be amused, amused at once, amused all the time; they
are not ready to make allowances; if an old song is a good song, it is
a good song, but if it is not a good song the seasoned music-hall-goer
will know it at once. I have heard him turn to his neighbour and say:
‘It’s all up. She won’t get across.’ Getting across the footlights is
not, in a music-hall, the same thing as getting across in a theatre.
The music-hall performer has no scenery to help him, in this sense,
that the properties are well known to the audience. I have seen
at least twenty turns at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in front of a
drop-curtain which I swear is Croydon High Street. The words of the
song are, as a rule, difficult to sing. Often, as in the case of George
Robey, the costume is stereotyped and never varies. Thus the music-hall
performer, having not the scenery of Harry Hope, or the knee-breeches
of Malvolio, can rely on nothing but himself. He comes naked into an
entirely cold world. His situation is ideally expressed by the old
cartoon of the impresario, his foot bound up to show that he has gout.
Before him stands the dingy figure of a little performer. This is their
dialogue:--
_Impresario_: ‘What’s your line?’
_Performer_: ‘Comedian.’
_Impresario_: ‘Well! get on with it! Make me laugh.’
If within one minute of his appearance the performer has not got his
laugh he will probably not get it at all. If he is famous, and if his
turn is not too bad, nothing worse will happen than the administration
of the frozen lemon. It is rather tragic, feeling the lemon come. You
feel the audience leap up towards the performer, for it is always ready
to give him his chance, even if he is unknown; then, in a minute or
so, you feel the audience drop away from him; you are aware that he
is not being listened to, for people begin to talk, to flutter with
their programmes, and perhaps some one may hum an irrelevant air. The
wretched performer knows it. If you are sitting in the first row of the
stalls you see anxiety come over his face. He begins to shout or to
dance rather wildly; he knows that he is not getting across; he tries
to attract attention as a cockatoo if he cannot do so as an eagle. Then
some one laughs derisively, and there is something hideous in that
laughter; it makes one think of the thumb-down attitude in the Roman
circus. The curtain drops in the middle of something that is half hum
and half silence. That is the lemon.
It is only in extreme cases that the audience manifests disapproval.
Indeed, it is an audience full of good-natured contempt, and if the
lemon is taken it willingly passes on to the next turn; as a rule,
the lemon is taken by the management, who ring down the curtain on
the first song and do not let the performer come on again. But if the
performer does come on again, and strives to recapture lost ground,
the audience will give him thirty seconds to do it; if he fails, the
hum grows angry as that of a swarm of bees. There is more derisive
laughter; a few yells come from the gallery; a general uproar develops
from the hum. You discern cries: ‘I want to go ’ome’.... ‘Take me back
to mother.’ ... Opponents reply as loudly: ‘Shut up! chuck him out!’
But the voices resume in more and more sepulchral tones: ‘I want to go
’ome,’ while others join the rag for the rag’s sake, and some stentor
high above roars: ‘Shut yer face, dear, I see yer Christmas dinner.’
And then everybody cries: ‘Chuck him out!’ while the performer sings
louder and louder, and the band makes still more desperate efforts to
drown his song. Then a large portion of the audience rise to their feet
and bellow enmity until the curtain goes down. That is the scarlet
bird, and I have not often seen it on the wing.
No, there is no mercy in the music-hall audience. For it is an honest
audience, and is, therefore, capable of every brutality. Also,
everybody has paid for his seat. Nobody there can afford to waste
that small payment. They must get their money’s worth. They know
exactly what they want; they have been wanting it ever since the
Middle Ages, and, on the whole, have been getting it. They want rough
and obvious jokes told in a subtle and intelligent way; they want to
see the performer break plates or sit on the butter, but he must do
it in a debonair style; they want songs of which they know the tune
by the time the second couplet is reached, favourite songs of which
they can bellow the choruses while the triumphant performer whispers
it; above all, they want their traditional jokes. Cheese, lodgers,
mothers-in-law, twins, meeting the missus at 3 a.m., alcoholic excess,
one or more of these must be introduced to make a successful song. It
does not matter who you are, whether the great McDermott, Dan Leno, or
R. G. Knowles, you must tie your little bark to the great ship of the
English music-hall tradition. No famous song has become famous unless
a portion of it at least dealt with one of these subjects: ‘Champagne
Charlie,’ ‘I’m following in father’s footsteps,’ ‘The Girl, the Woman,
and the Widow,’ are clear evidences of this. Perhaps that is why some
delicate artists, such as Maidie Scott and Wish Wynne, have never
quite ‘got there.’ Maidie Scott is the most finished product on the
music-halls of to-day. As soon as she comes on, her quick, schoolgirl
walk, her red hair, her _distrait_ eyes, and the voice which she knows
so amazingly how to keep down to a minor key, cut her right out of
the stage. When Maidie Scott sings ‘Amen,’ or ‘Father’s got the sack
from the water-works’ (all along of his cherry briar pipe, because
they were afraid he’d set the water-works on fire), and still more
when she sings, ‘I’m glad I took my mother’s advice,’ one has a sense
of extraordinary detachment. She is aloof, alone. She is so entirely
under restraint; knows so well how, at last, to let her voice swell and
underline her point; she knows so well how not to waste during a song
the power of her splendid blue eyes, but to reserve them for that final
point. Thus she should wield astonishing power, yet does not quite; she
lacks grossness; like Wish Wynne, her art is a little too delicate to
get across. The audience like her, they like Wish Wynne singing ‘Oo!
er!’ and miserably dragging her little tin trunk, but never for either
do they rise and roar as they do for Marie Lloyd.
It is true that Marie Lloyd takes us into another world, that of the
comfortable public-house, with plenty of lights and red plush; to the
publican’s dog-cart off to the Derby; to the large birthday party,
enlivened by plenty of sherry wine. In Marie Lloyd’s world everything
is fat, healthy, round, jolly, bouncing; when she keeps the old man’s
trousers to remember him by after he’s gone, she defines the human
quality of her sentiment: she can do nothing false and artificial, such
as pressing his nuptial buttonhole. Marie Lloyd is a woman before she
is an actress, and in this lies her strength. When she advises the
audience to ‘’Ave a little bit of what yer fancy (if you fancy it, if
you fancy it), ’Ave a little bit of what yer fancy, I say it does yer
good,’ Marie Lloyd is expressing the eternal claim of the flesh against
the spirit, which has been rediscovered a great many times since
Epicurus. She survives a great generation; there is nobody to-day fit
to wear her pleasantly-little shoes.
There is nobody, because the spirit of the music-hall is changing,
and women, who are more adaptable than men, are feeling it first. An
awful thing is happening to most of the young women on the halls; they
are becoming refined. Louie and Toots Pounds, Ella Retford, Clarice
Mayne, Ella Shields, have nothing of the Marie Lloyd tradition; they
are almost creatures of the drawing-room. Even Beattie and Babs, though
Babs does what she can with stockings that nothing will ever keep up,
never seem to experience the thick joy of being alive that Marie Lloyd
conveys in one slow, sidelong raising of her immortal eyelid. There is,
perhaps, a white hope, Daisy Wood, but one cannot be sure. They sing
well, these young women, they dance well; they do it too well; women
of the older tradition, such as Victoria Monks and Nellie Wallace are
still themselves: they do not do it so well, but they do it. These
are not trained, like the young women, but they have grown up and
discovered themselves; they do not _act_ joy or distress: they cut joy
or distress out of common life and lay it down on the bare planks. All
that is going, for the music-hall is growing refined.
Let me dispel a possible misunderstanding. When I say music-hall I do
not mean those sinks of virtue, the Coliseum, or the Palladium, the
Palace, and the Hippodrome. Those are royal theatres of varieties,
eminently suited for long skirts and acrobats, and large enough for
elephants. Two of them can safely be handed over to revue, and the
rest is silence. I have seen Mr George Robey, I forget whether it was
at the Palladium or the Coliseum, and the place was so broad, and so
deep, and so high, that his eyebrows looked normal: can I add anything
to the horror of this picture? The only comedian who ever seemed to me
a success in those barns was Little Tich, as little Miss Turpentine,
because they made him still smaller, which heightened his effect. But
those halls pay large salaries, and I suppose they will go on. Indeed,
I fear that they are gaining ground because we are daily sinking deeper
in the Joseph Lyons civilisation, where everything must be cheap,
gilt, and enormous. The old halls, the Holborn, the Metropolitan, the
Bedford, Collins’s, will not last long; already many halls have been
seized, the Tivoli and the Canterbury by cinemas, the Shepherd’s Bush,
I think the Paragon, Mile End, and certainly the Shoreditch Empire by
Sir Oswald Stoll. We have to count with Sir Oswald Stoll. Together with
Sir Joseph Lyons, he has done more to drive out Merrie England than
the dourest champion of methodism. You can go to his music-halls, or
to the Palladium, which is not a Stoll hall, but a stollomorphe, and
nothing will offend your good taste. During the last dozen years Sir
Oswald Stoll has been engaged in a continuous and painfully successful
campaign to raise the English music-hall; he has almost succeeded in
elevating it. True, in his halls appear all those men who carry on the
old tradition and glorify the flesh: George Robey, Sam Stern, Ernie
Mayne, Sam Mayo, who sing the crude joy of poor life, which is found in
drunken sprees and conjugal misunderstandings, but which yet is true
life. Little by little their songs grow less broad. Sam Mayo would
not, at a Stoll hall, sing the ditty which used to delight the old
Middlesex: ‘Ching Chang, wing wang, bing, bang, boo,’ nor would Dutch
Daly sing about the larks in May. Our old comedians are limiting their
humours, discolouring their noses, rolling their umbrellas. The young
ladies in the audience, and their young gentlemen, modern forms of the
donah and her bloke, would feel uncomfortable if too crudely reminded
that love is something more than kisses on Brighton Pier under a pale
pink sunshade. The old comedians are not yet dead, and Ernie Mayne can
still sing:--
‘Last night I wandered thro’ the park,
I met a female after dark;
And, feeling faint for want of food,
I fell into her arms--how rude!
Just then she murmured “Kiss me,
George!” her face I chanced to see,
The girl was black, with nigger lips;
I shouted, “Not for me!”
It’s my meatless day, my meatless day,
I’m not going to eat any sort of meat.
Meat, meat, meat, meat,
I’m thin and pale, all I’ve put away
Is two roly-polies, never left a crumb,
Three currant puddings and a little bit of plum,
And five apple-dumplings are rolling round my tum,
’Cos it’s my meatless day.’
Yes, Ernie Mayne may still sing his songs of Araby, but little by
little he is being borne down by the American raconteur, whose
impropriety is always in the best of taste, by the ragtime dancer, by
the wandering Italian fiddler, by the respectable eccentric at the
piano, by the juggler, by the refined soprano, who sings ‘God send you
back to me, over the mighty sea,’ or, ‘There’s a little mother always
yearning for the ones that long to roam.’ It’s all getting so clean, so
precious pure. The old comedian will not last long. He that was once a
bull in a china-shop will soon become a Stolled ox.
But the worst may yet have to come. A new demon is arising in the
shape of the cinema. It is as if Merrie England, that once lived at
the Surrey Theatre and the Globe, and was driven out when the middle
class began to frequent the theatre about 1870 and took refuge in the
caves of harmony, then doubled back into the Tivoli and the Oxford
(fortunately to provide what the late W. T. Stead called ‘drivel
for the dregs’), were being pursued. Wherever Merrie England goes,
it seems that, as Mark Sheridan used to put it, ‘the villain thtill
purthued her, purthued her, purthued her.’ When the music-hall has been
completely improved I wonder whether he will be glad to have ‘purthued
her’ to such good purpose. Certainly, in the cinemas, little is left of
the old spirit that arose as one drank one’s beer in the stalls at the
old Mogul, for the cinema, let police magistrates say what they like,
bears deep upon its brow the brand of Abel.
The cinema, like most new and virile things, has split opinion, and has
collected round itself more unwise friends and unthinking enemies than
any other form of entertainment. Few people like cinemas; they either
love them or loathe them, while a few, I suppose, fall into my section
of feeling and hate them for not being better than they are. For I
believe in the cinema; I do not think that the cinema will do away with
the theatre and the novel, but I do believe that it is destined to play
a still larger part in the amusement of the people. Also, I believe
that it is destined to play a cleaner, that is, a more artistic part.
How far it can be brought, I do not know, because I do not suppose that
I am the one chosen by nature to raise it high; but if we consider
films such as _The Birth of a Nation_, or _Intolerance_, where Mr
D. W. Griffith, a man of some slight culture, is not entirely devoid
of taste, and certainly bold in his conceptions, audacious in his
execution, we cannot wave the cinema away with a sneer at cowboy drama.
The cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on horseback,
by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, for the first
time, movement could be reproduced. The reproduction of movement was
a new pleasure, and so the mob clamoured for it. Carry yourself back
to your first film and, be you as highbrowed as you like, you will
not deny that you enjoyed those febrile races, those people falling
out of windows, crashing through ceilings, the violent opening and
shutting of doors, the rush of flying crockery. Then you grew tired of
it and began to think it silly. Well, it was silly, and it is silly,
but we should remember that the pioneers of the cinema were Americans
of the travelling-showman type, men whose fathers had exhibited
the _camera obscura_ loved of our fathers; they had passed through
dissolving views, and that type of man could not be expected to like,
and therefore to put forward, a dramatic version of _Paradise Lost_.
Briefly, the cinema was put forward by the vulgar, for the vulgar,
but by degrees, as the mob grew weary of movement for movement’s sake,
as the profits increased, new men such as Pathé, Urban, Gaumont, came
in. They were commercial men, but not vulgar men, men who realised
that if there was a public for the novels of Mr E. F. Benson and the
plays of Mr Alfred Sutro, there must be a cinema public for something
less lurid than the early films. By degrees, the cinema improved; it
improved in conceptions when subjects such as _Quo Vadis?_, _The Walls
of Jericho_, _Bella Donna_, appeared on the film; yet more ambitious
things were done in the shape of _Hamlet_, _Julius Cæsar_, _Justice_,
_Intolerance_, and many more.
The film improved, too, in its actual execution. The earliest type of
film actor was scraped up from the East Side gutters of New York and
the graving-docks of Naples. For that early cinema you needed creatures
immensely unrestrained, yelling, dancing, dirty creatures, not at
all the people who could have impersonated what the old lady in the
pit called the ‘married life of the dear Queen.’ And as the subjects
changed the actors changed; many were taken from the stage; some,
to this day, preserve certain characteristics of the ordinary human
being. It is not quite their fault if they do not preserve them all;
the cinema has had time to make a tradition of its own, which is still
represented by the American posters we see upon the walls, where the
heroines have enormous eyes and more teeth than Lulu Dentifrice; where
the young men have straight backs to their heads, half a pound of white
meat on each cheek, a rugged brow, or an emetic grin, briefly, the
most brutal type of Chicago commercial rigged out in the dress clothes
of a suicide; where ladies whose clothing is too low for blouses and
too high for evening frocks, whose jewels flash beyond the dreams of
Gophir, quaff the sparkling champagne wine. Where the illustrator
manages to make Miss Irene Vanbrugh look vulgar. Where American
policemen (or admirals, you never know) arrest crooks in mid-air;
where all is six-shooters, bowie-knives, cinches, and snarks. Like
poster like player, is, to a certain extent, true, for the producer is
still a cross between Pimple and the sort of stockbroker whose silk
hat glitters in eight places. (Observe the band on his cigar.) But
that producer, like that poster, is the old tradition, and is giving
way before the ordinary business man who does not see the world in
terms of banana falls. That new man is not pressing his actors as the
old producer did. He still makes them register, but less intensely.
Register means to mark the emotions. When the hero is being filmed, and
the heroine enters, he smiles; if he does not smile beatifically enough
the producer will cry to him: ‘Register delight!’ You have all seen the
result. In the old days they were registering all the time; you could
see the heroine registering terror, while the hero registered nobility,
and the villain registered hate; meanwhile, the old mother dropped a
stitch and registered benevolence with extreme pertinacity, and, all
the time, servants in the background were registering national pride
and rectitude. One still has to do these things on the cinema because,
after all, the cinema picture has to be photographable. It has to be
seen rather plainly, but the cinema producer has begun to understand
that, to be effective, facial expression need not be recognisable a
mile away.
It is the excessive vigour of the cinema has endeared it to Londoners;
most of them are a rather lymphatic crowd, because they live in too
large a city, surrounded by too many interesting things, because they
eat rather bad food and not enough of it, and also because most of them
work in stuffy offices and factories. Thus they need strong stimuli
if they are to react, and no doubt that is why cinemas are being
established one by the side of the other, and run for ten hours a day.
Like the sensational stories in the magazines, like the newspapers
which consist in much headline and little text, they spur this tired
creature. The more he is spurred, the more tired he grows. The more
tired he grows, the more he needs spurring. So the cinema must prosper.
But I think it will prosper in a more moderate way; it will continue
to grow, to absorb theatres and music-halls; it has already absorbed
the Coronet, the Canterbury, Sadler’s Wells, the Tivoli, the Scala,
the London Opera House, and others; but I think it will more and more
tend to produce the historical film, films based on novels and plays
of some slight merit; that it will increasingly provide bearable music.
For a while it may not originate much, and therefore it will not easily
become a form of art. I am not sure that it can become a form of art,
though I do not know why: the ballet is a form of art, and people like
Nijinsky, Pavlova, Madame Rambert (let alone Taglioni and Genée) have
made a great deal of it. I do not say that it is impossible for the
cinema to produce a work of art, but this must be within the limits
of pantomime, which are close and narrow limits. Subtle emotions it
cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this,
because she thought that he thought that.’ (If a cinema company will
film _The Golden Bowl_, I will burn seven candles as an offering to the
Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave to the play and the
novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an
hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices
of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce
footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. Because it cannot
speak, it must move, and so it is a different kind of thing.
That does not mean that it need always be the rather crude thing it is
to-day. As people of better taste come into the business, we are likely
to do away with a few of the continual changes of scene; we shall
reduce repetitions, such as the woman who endlessly rocks the baby’s
cradle between every tragic scene in _Intolerance_. Repetition is the
way in which a crude taste rams its point home; a fine taste will
select its points better, need to make them less obvious, know how to
vary them. The selective art of the novelist can thus be applied. Also,
the finer taste will not corrupt the actor as hitherto he has been
corrupted, by leading him into a wilderness of monkeys. The cinema will
learn restraint, that first need of all art. Some of the actors, such
as Norma Talmadge, Pauline Frederick, Mary Pickford, and especially
Charlie Chaplin, have already evolved a new form of acting, and not
a mean one. When Charlie Chaplin runs along a road, in that queer,
lolloping way which starts from the shoulders and animates his fingers
and his elbows, chasing a Rolls-Royce that is obviously travelling
at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, when thereupon he falls into
a ditch, and extricates himself with an air of incredulity, when he
then appears to realise, with a detachment that none but Plato could
have equalled, that he is not likely to catch that car, and decides to
go home, Charlie Chaplin does a wonderful thing: he turns his back on
the audience, and you know, from a little ripple in his back that he
is considering the situation. Then the head gives a jerk, one of the
shoulders goes up, the fingers give a twist, and long before Charlie
Chaplin turns round to face the audience, with his soft eyes laughing,
his animate body has told you what he meant: ‘It’s gone. Oh, well, I
don’t care.’ The popularity of others may wane, but Charlie Chaplin is
a monument. As in the case of the music-halls, a merciless audience has
formed, and its love has readily been given to the best.
III
THE FRIENDLY BOWL