Here and there in the big and little towns of America cranks are
busily working for the elevation of the stage. Every 2 x 4
newspaper man who thinks he has a mission, every preacher who
desires to make a sensation in the pulpit, every maiden novelist
whose feminine mind battens in pruriency, every old maid who has
missed her opportunity to be manhandled and wishes to reform a
race she has done nothing to increase, every two-for-a-quarter
evangelist between Bangor and Los Angeles is talking a lung out
for the public on the subject of making the stage higher and
better. When Col. Hercules, not of Herculaneum, viewed the Augean
stables he may have thought that he had a considerable job on
hand, but he tackled it with a man's strength and brain. By the
help of his good right arm and a river or two he got rid of some
thousands of tons of filth which went to enrich the levels lower
down. Col. Hercules died in time to save his reputation. If
required to cleanse the modern stage, he would pull his beaver
over his brows and sneak out of town. Col. Hercules was a man who
knew when he was over-weighted. He entered the ring only with
such opponents as he stood a chance to best.
Once upon a time I boarded in a little German hotel in this city.
Near it was the great Madison Square Garden. In consequence, the
little hotel, which was very German--that is to say, clean and
cheap,--was patronized by many actors and actresses. They had
little rooms upstairs, got their morning coffee in the little
restaurant and after the evening's performance sat in the little
apartment off the bar, where the floor was sanded and drank beer
until the small hours. These men were representatives of their
profession so far as America is concerned. There were no stars
among them and none of the lowest stratum. They were of the
middle class of the people of the footlights. Nearly all of them
were married and a few of them had children. They had the small
ambitions and the small amusements of their class.
At that time I worked upon one of New York's yellow journals. I
reached the hotel each morning between 12 and 1 o'clock, and
always found the theatrical symposium in full blast. I was with
these people for three months for an hour or two each night and
think that I formed a fair idea of what the American stage is
like. In those months I heard just two general subjects
discussed--grease-paint and copulation. That was all of it. No
science, no literature, no art in its higher sense, no news of
the day, no politics, no sports, no history, no travel, not
anything that goes to make up the intellectual life of the
ordinary man. From first to last it was the business of acting,
the demerits of some actor not present, the merits of those
present, the pursuit of woman and the unholy pleasures of
indiscriminate sexual lust. The dominating passion of these
people was a petty jealousy. I never heard from them a good word
for a successful brother artist. I never heard them breathe one
generous hope that other men or women would grow happy and
prosperous. I never heard them speak a kindly sentence for one of
their ranks who had fallen upon evil days. They were selfish,
they were brutally abusive, they were ridiculously conceited,
they were all geniuses held down by a conspiracy of managers,
they were card and dice sharpers, they were willing at any time
to act the part of procurer or procuress for a consideration of
drinks and suppers. I was rejoiced at the opportunity to study a
type that was new to me, and when I got enough of it I moved out.
I have met these people and their kind many times since then. I
have seen them in Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Chicago, New
Orleans and San Francisco. They are everywhere the same. They do
not differ in any degree. On the road they are slightly more
restrained, for fear of corporal punishment or jail, but the
impulse of gluttony and lechery is always there. Any keeper of a
second or third-class hotel in a town that is on one of the big
circuits is apt to grow eloquent upon the subject of theatrical
folk if given the chance. They are noted for a brazen effrontery
in demanding everything that is in sight and the laxity with
which they regard a debt incurred. I have no doubt that the first
man to let his valise down from the second-story window of a
hotel, slide down the rope himself and thus square his bill was
the leading comedian of that sterling bit of humor, "Hot Times in
the Tenderloin." Meantime his soubrette, who was another man's
wife, was waiting for him outside, and they went away together.
I do not know that the baleful fire of unchaste amour runs more
fiercely in the veins of stage people. I only know that they give
it more of a free field. You sometimes hear some bar-room
comedian and booze recitationist, who draws a hamfatter's salary
in a continuous vaudeville, declare to half drunken listeners
that there are good women on the stage. So there are--some. But
they are so rare that when they are found they shine like the
jewel in the Ethiop's ear. It would be within the bounds of truth
to say that for every virtuous woman behind the foot-lights there
are ten prostitutes. Even those who try to keep their feet from
the mire and succeed are given no credit for chastity by their
fellow professionals. One night, in my never to be forgotten
German hotel, I was assured in a thing in loud-patterned trousers
and a snow-white overcoat with deep black collar and cuffs, that
he knew Emma Abbott, then dead, was unfaithful to her husband,
Eugene Wetherell, also dead. This was spoken of "honest little
Emma." A purer woman never lived. I knew that he was lying and
told him so, but he was ready with a tale of time, place and
circumstance and brazened it out. In like manner I have been told
tales of Mary Anderson and Modjeska and Viola Allen--all of them
lies. They were the tributes which my gentle friends, male and
female, paid to success in their beautiful but risky profession.
It is not to be wondered that women who go on the stage lose
their virtue. The wonder is that some of them preserve it, in
spite of the life they lead and the company they are forced to
keep. The very talents they possess render them susceptible to
adulation and applause. They keep late hours. They are thrown
constantly with conscienceless males. They breathe an atmosphere
of excitement. If they display unusual capabilities, they are
intoxicated nightly with the deep, rich, moving roar of high
acclaim. Their nerves need bracing and they take to late suppers
and champagne with absinthe in the mornings. From the woman who
drinks to the woman who falls is not a far cry. I once asked
Lizzie Annandale, the contralto, to tell me why so many stage
girls surrendered their most precious possession within a year
after their first night behind the scenes. She was a frank old
party, willing to talk to a friend:
"Aw," she said, "that's easy. Women are only human. The girls
are cut off from association with decent people. They have to
live with stage folks. Society is barred to them. Stage men marry
only when they can't help it. The girl must have somebody to look
after her, some man to see that her trunks are checked, that she
gets a decent seat in a crowded train, that she doesn't get the
worst of it all around. A man expects pay of some kind and she
hasn't anything to give except herself. That is what he wants.
Take our own company, for instance. We are carrying twenty chorus
girls. We are bound for the southern circuit. After we play New
Orleans we play Texas. After we leave Texas we make a jump
straight across the continent to 'Frisco. The girls don't get
wages enough to enable them to take berths in the sleepers. They
will be forced to herd day and night in the other coaches with
the men. You will see the chorus people, male and female, asleep
two and two on the seats. The exhausted woman's head rests on the
shoulder of her companion, the man's arm around her to hold her
steady. What do you suppose happens when a thing like that is
kept up for awhile? Aw! W'at t'ell."
Despite the constant efforts of the classes mentioned in the
opening paragraph of this story, the American stage is not being
elevated to any extent. It is steadily sinking lower. Year after
year its plays grow worse, its players more reckless and debased.
This, it has been said, is the fault of the public and, to a
great extent, this is so. The managers are in the business for
money. They give the people that which the people will pay to
see. Nobody cares anything for tragedy any longer. Stage classics
have become stage stalenesses. Shakespeare is out of date. "The
Gaiety Girls," "In Gay New York," "The Merry World," Hoyt's
buffooneries, "Problem Plays," social eraticisms have become the
rage. Translations from the French, with all of the French
immorality reduced to English grossness, pack the theaters. In
New York a manager named Doris put on a pantomime which
represented the scene in a bridal chamber. The police closed it
up after half the bald-headed men and nearly all the boys in town
had seen it. That pantomime, I understand, is now drawing crowded
houses in Chicago, having been introduced to the citizens of the
western metropolis by Sam Jack of "Adamless Eden" game.
Continuous performances are proving mines of gold for their
conductors and in the continuous performance the vulgar song and
ribald jest meet with readiest applause. Your wife or your
daughter, who goes down town for her morning shopping, gets lunch
with a glass of absinthe, drops into the continuous show for an
hour and comes home with memories in her little head of a song
which should be interdicted by law, or of a dialogue that ought
to land the speakers in jail, or of Hope Booth, posing in
imitation nudity as Venus Aphrodite, or some beefy actor, also an
imitation nude, as Ajax defying the lightning, or Antinous,
facing the audience full front without a stitch of clothing on
him. This is pleasant for the wife and daughter, but how about
you? You do not look anything like Ajax and your daughter's
brothers bear no resemblance to Antinous.
Thousands of men and women are actors and actresses, but they do
not differ in type. They are to be recognized anywhere in any
crowd. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are invested in the
business, and it is the business of the owners to make them pay.
The public wants filth and it gets it. The plays given to patrons
have only the purpose to make money. They are not written to
educate, to uplift, to ennoble. The men who make them look only
to the collection of their royalties. The best play of the year
is Gillette's "Secret Service." It is trifling. It does not teach
anything. It inculcates no moral. It does not deviate in any way
from the well known "war play." In these days there is always
some snipe of a federal lieutenant, who gets shot in the heel, or
under his coat tail, or somewhere behind, and is quartered on the
family of a southern planter, and the daughter falls in love with
him, and her brother is in the Confederate army, and there is a
whole lot of trouble and everything comes out all right in the
end. Gillette's hero is a Federal spy instead of a lieutenant,
but that is about the only difference. I imagine that he must
have been many times to see Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah," whose
favorite novelist in turn, I think, must have been E. P. Roe, of
"Barriers Burned Away." The next success, it is supposed, will be
something in the line of Mr. Howard's "Aristocracy." This play,
its author assures us, was written to demonstrate the danger that
lies in an American girl marrying an European nobleman. Instead,
it administers a solar plexus blow to American womanhood. The
heroine marries a German prince, merely because he is a Prince,
discarding her honest and true lover in a scoundrelly fashion,
while her beautiful stepmother comes within an ace of
surrendering her person to her son- in-law, and is prevented only
by the inopportune arrival of her idiotic husband. It is all very
"elevating," and a good thing to take your wife and daughter to
see.
We arrive at this formula: The American stage is debasing;
American stage people are dead beats and women of scarlet. There
are exceptions, but they prove the rule. The business is
Jew-ridden. They do not act, but they handle the dollars.
Everybody knows that your Jew drummer and your Jew theatrical
manager are incapable of anything sexually wrong. The big
syndicate which has its home in this city and is endeavoring to
control the theatrical business of more than half the country is
composed of Jews. One of them is an undersized Silenus named
Erlanger, who used to be a pensioner upon the personal and mental
abilities of the ill-fated Louise Balfe and repaid her for her
bread and favors by brutally assaulting her in Arkansas.
Yes, Brother Iconoclast, the 2 x 4 newspaper men and the
sensational preachers and the prurient prudes who write novels
and the unfructified old maids and the narrow-beamed
self-elected evangelists are talking, but they do not elevate the
American stage to any great extent. It bids fair to remain the
same excellent school of preparation for the penitentiary and the
bagnio. New York, November 20, 1897.
"THE CHRISTIAN."