THE MORALITY OF OUR DRAMA
Mr Harry Lauder on the Morals of our Drama
A little while ago Mr Harry Lauder made some statements to a
representative of _The Daily Chronicle_ concerning the relations between
music-halls and theatres. Some readers may be aware that Mr Harry Lauder
is a popular music-hall singer, and by many people regarded as the chief
of his calling. Consequently his utterances have a little importance.
According to Mr Lauder a gulf exists between the theatres and the
music-halls, and it is due to the fact that the playhouses traffic in
immorality and the halls are pure. The variety theatres shudder at the
thought of presenting plays that introduce people who are or have been
unduly intimate without marriage. Let us use the words of the stern
moralist: "Now, take certain plays produced in certain theatres. The
curtain rises, and you ask yourself the question, 'Will they marry?'"
The attitude reminds one a little of the dear ladies at the seaside who
use prism field-glasses in order to be sure whether the costumes of the
bathers are really indecent. "Sometimes you think, 'Are they married?'
In that play there is throughout a suggestiveness which would not be
allowed in a music-hall."
Ye gods and little Lauder, how beautiful and simple is the morality of
the music-hall! "Be married and you will be virtuous" seems to sum it
up. From the Lauder point of view there are no difficult questions of
morality; there are sheep and there are goats, but no hybrids, and we
ought never to refer to the goats in public. There are no problem plays,
for there are no problems; everything is plain and easy. Intimate
relations between people not married to one another are beyond
discussion, and it is vulgar to present such law-breakers upon the
stage.
The great Lauder attacks Mr Barrie; he complains of _What Every Woman
Knows_. It has one fault, for "there is a touch of immorality in it
which does not exist, as he must know, in the true character of a
Scotsman. The man going away with another woman is the only part of the
play which I did not like; and it was quite unnecessary. Jimmy Barrie is
a far cleverer man than he thinks he is, but I am sorry for this piece."
Poor Mr Barrie, the great Lauder is sorry for you. Still, it must be
some comfort for you to know that the great illustrious immortal Lauder
calls you "Jimmy."
Let us dig a little deeper into the gold-mine. It is very touching to
see the confidence of Mr Lauder in the virtue of his fellow-countrymen.
According to him, "no touch of immorality exists in the true character
of a Scotsman." Yet it is said that the streets of bonnie Glasgow and
other great towns of virtuous Scotland are not free from the presence of
the hapless followers of Rahab, but perhaps they are only there for the
entertainment of English visitors.
According to the last edition of _Chambers's Encyclopaedia_, the
proportion of illegitimate births in Scotland to legitimate is nearly
twice the proportion in England, and almost three times as great as that
in Ireland. No doubt this, again, is due to the foul Saxon. It is
wonderful that the Scots do not prevent us from coming into their
virtuous country. Yet an idea comes to mind--uncharitable, no doubt.
Some people have thought it an ugly touch in Mr Barrie's play when one
of Maggie's brothers hissed the term of reproach "Englishman" to John
Shand on discovering his faithlessness to his wife. It seemed a brutal
charge of Pharisaism to the minds of us benighted Southerners. Was the
author making an anticipatory hit at Mr Lauder?
Somewhat later in the interview are these words: "Now, when you go to
the theatre you get the good and the bad characters, and I contend that
there is no necessity to show the bad." Alas! poor Shakespeare, Lauder
obliterates you with a sentence, and under his severe censure your
warmest admirers should try to save your reputation by accepting the
view that Bacon wrote the plays--and the poems as well. It would be
thrilling to have a drama in which all the characters were good, but how
would the dramatists construct their plots without the use of a villain?
However, to be just to Mr Lauder, by badness of character he means lack
of reverence for chastity. It is a curious point of view that involves
the banishment from the stage of all questions concerning right and
wrong in the traffic between man and woman, which condemns _What Every
Woman Knows_ as immoral. People used to think that the music-hall stage
might be a kind of feeding-ground for drama, might breed playgoers
capable of taking the view that drama has other functions than merely
that of amusing; but, if the illustrious Lauder is correct, the
music-halls stand aloof. Even the ladies of the promenade would be
shocked by _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, fly blushingly from _The
Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, and put ashes on their dyed hair if _Iris_ were
offered to them. What a topsy-turvydom the entertainment world seems
when a popular star ventures to censure in a great daily paper the
modern drama of the country and takes himself quite seriously in urging
the superiority of the music-halls in taste and morality to the
theatres!
Mr Lauder, in addition to his curious ideas about drama from a moral
point of view, seems to have strange opinions concerning the nature of
plays. He says: "Moreover, in a theatre only one or two stars appear,
and they appear only now and again; otherwise they would not shine! If
they were always on the stage there would be a sameness in the
performance. And the other members of the company are only playing up to
these stars, giving so much padding to the entertainment. Little wonder
that the public is not satisfied with the play of to-day." If we
understand this correctly, and we have honestly tried to do so, it
involves a complete misunderstanding as to the nature of drama, and
means that Mr Lauder thinks that its whole purpose is to provide star
acting parts, and that, since plays cannot be written in which all the
characters are star parts, drama is a poor sort of stuff of no great
interest. In his calling, of course, all are stars, though, perhaps, he
would hardly admit that all are of equal brilliance; and one fancies
that he regards as inacceptable any entertainment during which part of
the stage is occupied by persons receiving no greater salary than that
of a county court judge.
Of course, every man is entitled to his own point of view, and if Mr
Lauder considers that his turns are preferable to drama, he is quite
right to say so. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of
persons to whom his performances represent the summit of art; they, of
course, are entitled to their opinions.
There is no reason for supposing that his remarks are not uttered in
good faith. Indeed, it is their obviously complacent sincerity which
renders them so exquisitely comic. If he were half as funny on the stage
as he is in cold print, the whole world would be at his feet. From one
point of view his utterances are quite unimportant: to the world outside
the music-hall they only represent the unintentional humours of a man
without weight, save in his branch of his calling; but, so far as they
are the opinions of the variety stage, the matter is serious, since it
suggests that the modern drama has an enemy, not a friend, in the
music-halls, and an enemy which works under such unfair conditions of
advantage and is so powerfully organised that it may become the duty of
the theatre to wage a fierce war upon it.
No great change would be needed in the conduct of the playhouses in
London to enable them to cut into the music-halls. The sympathy with the
music-halls of those who have been advocating free trade in drama may
become exhausted, and, on the other hand, a system may be devised under
which the theatres take music-hall licences, and then the inflated
salaries which have led to swollen heads will soon shrink.
Double Entente
The correspondence provoked concerning Mr Harry Lauder and his views
about the drama and the music-halls was a little disappointing owing to
its onesidedness. The music-hall performer in one respect resembled St
Athanasius. A passage in a letter on the topic was surprising. Miss
Violet Vanbrugh said: "The English language, too, is so difficult; it
leaves so little to the imagination. It seems to come down definitely,
in a fearfully flat-footed fashion. The French dramatist finds his task
made easy, as his language can suggest simply without definitely
stating, more easily than can be done in English."
This opinion is surprising. It would be amazing if it were correct,
seeing the enormous wealth of our language in words and forms of
expression, and the fact that for the best part of a century our
dramatists lived chiefly on "hints," upon suggesting more than they
durst say. The very word "hint" is significant. We use it frequently;
who can find a word in the French language that exactly represents it?
One may add that we have English equivalents for most, perhaps all, of
the French phrases that have to serve for our handy word "hint." When
one recollects the hundreds of adaptations of more or less indelicate or
indecent French plays seen on our boards, the idea that it is difficult
for the English expert to say nasty things nicely seems absurd. Our
journalists have used more often the incorrect phrase _double entendre_
than the French critics the phrase _double entente_, which is the term
that our writers intend to employ.
Were it otherwise, one would be amazed. The French always have been, and
still are, very candid in the use of language; whilst we for a long time
past have been prudish to an extent sometimes comic. Readers of Laurence
Sterne can hardly deny that the English tongue enables one to be
indelicate in idea whilst decent in expression, and it is noteworthy
that this writer, so often censured for the immodest salt of his wit, is
one of those who comment with surprise upon the simple frankness of the
French of his time. There is an episode in "Tristram Shandy," or "The
Sentimental Journey" concerning a lady, the author and a carriage drive,
which shows this very well; but the printers would strike if asked to
set it up in these chaste pages.
Our own native prudery, enriched by a quantity imported from the United
States, has led to an immense hypocrisy of language, and consequently to
an extraordinary facility in hinting unseemly ideas which on the French
stage would be expressed bluntly. It is true that, so far as love is
concerned, the French have invented a funny little language of prudery
for the benefit of schoolgirls, and countless books have been printed,
and received the benediction of Monseigneur l'Archevêque de Tours, in
which the word _tambour_ is printed instead of the word _amour_, and so
on. By-the-by, it is rather quaint that the Archbishop of Tours should
be chosen as godfather of these superchaste books, seeing that Touraine
has a rather famous reputation for naughty stories, and Balzac alleges
that his naughty "Contes Drolatiques" are "Colliges ez Abbayes de
Touraine." It would be remarkable if the French tongue lent itself as
easily as ours to the _double entente_.
We have a far larger vocabulary available and in common use, and we
possess slang not only of the different nations constituting the United
Kingdom, but also slang from the United States, and from our Colonies,
whilst we have a lawlessness in the use of our language not permitted to
the French. There are disadvantages as well as advantages from this, for
as a result our tongue is abominably rich in ambiguities, and it is a
common observation that French scientific works are clearer than ours,
not only because the nation is more logical, but also on account of the
fact that the language is more precise. Some people, no doubt, fancy
that the French dramatists are conveying indelicate ideas delicately,
because they do not exactly understand what is being said or sung.
Remarks have been made about the subtlety of French after speeches and
songs which, if literally translated, would have cleared the house. "_Ne
rien comprendre c'est tout gober_" is a convenient twist of language.
Did not Yvette Guilbert sing publicly in London the song with the
refrain "_Hors du mariage_" ... we must stop there.
Our stage has suffered because our dramatists have been able to get much
of the indelicate fun out of French farces by using, hypocritically,
decent phrases which all parties understand in a bad sense whilst
pretending to see nothing shocking in them; for without this elasticity
of our tongue British playwrights would have been thrown upon their own
resources. Nowadays our playwrights have to some extent abandoned their
subservience to France, and it is noticeable that those who take their
work seriously, and deal with the difficult questions of life sincerely,
are showing a tendency to abandon the language of suggestion, to give up
hinting, and to avoid the _double entente_. The result is that many
prudes are shocked, and people who have no real objection to certain
subjects or ideas denounce plays embodying them because this hypocrisy
of language has been abandoned.
The Censor, of course, is one obstacle to plain speaking. He and his
office are the superb representatives of English cant, hypocrisy and
prudery, and one advantage that must follow from the abolition, if it
comes, will be the ousting of the comedy of indecent suggestion by the
drama of honest candour. He possesses his little vocabulary in which
_tambour_ passes for _amour_, and in fact his office has been worked on
the ostrich head-in-the-sand system for many years past. The chief duty
of the official has been to prevent people from calling a spade a spade,
and most, though not all, of the pieces banned would have obtained a
licence if in place of straightforward phrase the author had employed
some hypocritical, prudish suggestion.
Who doubts that a licensed English version of _Monna Vanna_ could have
been prepared, although fully giving to the audience the meaning of the
awful line, "_Nue sous son manteau_"? One may doubt the comic story that
Mr Redford mistook the _sous_ for _sans_. The motto for the office, if
it has a crest, should be the famous line from a music-hall song: "It
ain't exac'ly wot 'e sez, it's the narsty way 'e sez it."
No wonder foreigners are puzzled by our theatre. The Parisian sees a
Palais Royal farce played before an audience of which many members are
girls in the bread-and-butter stage. In his great city maidens are--or,
at least, were--not allowed to enter the theatre so long famous for its
naughty farces. He gasps; he wonders whether the English _mees_ is as
innocent as she looks--or used to look--and does not know the _perfide_
tongue of the _perfide Albion_ well enough to be aware that nothing
shocking is said, and that it is pretended that the _cocotte_ is a mere
kindly friend, the _collage_ a trifling flirtation, the _debauche_ a
viceless lark, and that the foulest conduct of husband or wife does not
reach a real breach of the commandment more often broken in England than
the rest of the sacred ten.
The real sin of the Censor's office lies as much in what it permits as
in what it forbids; and a growing sense of decency in the public is
displacing prudery so that the abolition of the office will not cause
the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of
the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from
responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient
prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his own
thoughts.
Moral Effect on Audience
There was quite a pretty hubbub in theatredom caused by a circular
letter of "The Church Pastoral Aid Society," calling upon incumbents and
curates to regard theatrical performances as "a serious menace to the
spiritual influence of the Church," and suggesting that in future they
should refuse to take money raised by means of theatrical performances,
or by bazaars or whist-drives or dances. Of course, all people connected
with the theatres were very indignant at the insult implied; whilst, on
the other hand, many parsons and Nonconformist ministers rushed into
print and said very unflattering things about the stage.
The matter certainly had considerable public importance, and deserved to
be considered in cold blood; and one may well raise, and attempt to
answer, the plain question whether the Church is right or wrong in
adopting an attitude of hostility towards the stage. The question of
gratitude has been put forward, but is not really relevant: no doubt
players and managers in the past have been very liberal with their
services for charitable purposes, including matters specifically
connected with churches, and although very often the actual motive of
the liberality has been the desire for advertisement and notoriety--and
the desire is natural and blameless--yet it is fair to assume that in
many instances the real motive has been truly charitable. It is,
however, obvious that a person might steal with the object of giving the
money to a church restoration fund, and clearly his intention would not
excuse his act nor enable the Church to endorse it. The plain question
is whether the stage "makes for righteousness."
Into the very thorny question raised some years ago by Clement Scott
with disastrous consequences to himself as to whether the stage is
demoralizing to the actors and actresses we do not now propose to
venture. Much has been said and written on the topic, but it is largely
one of fact, which demands the examination of a great deal of evidence.
For the moment, then, let us merely discuss the question whether the
effect of the stage on the audience is good or bad: in many cases there
is no appreciable effect at all, and they may be eliminated.
Now, it must be admitted by all, save the extreme Puritans, that not
only are there a great number of harmless pieces, but also many entirely
moral in scope and aim, and likely to produce some good effect upon
playgoers; but there are others. No doubt the famous _George Barnwell_
has gone out of date, and the Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard plays, which
did a great deal of harm, are not presented often in our days.
Nevertheless there are so many pieces still produced which in one way or
another are injurious to playgoers as to render it fairly arguable that
the effect of the stage as a whole is bad.
So long as religion enjoins the virtue of chastity, its professors must
look with hostility upon the very numerous pieces in which women, young
and beautiful, are presented in dresses radically immodest. It seems
impossible to deny that the sexual instincts of young men are often
provoked to an extreme degree by the sight upon the stage of beautiful,
half-nude young women; and it must be remembered that the spectacle is
frequently accompanied by music of an erotic character. There is not the
least doubt that the lighter musico-dramatic works and the pantomimes,
in consequence of these matters, are the direct and immediate cause of
many acts which religious people regard as acts of sexual immorality.
The degree of nudity, of display of the human form in our theatres, and,
of course, music-halls as well, to those unaccustomed to such matters is
certainly quite startling, and by many people such displays are regarded
as being entirely demoralizing to hot-blooded young men. It is,
therefore, not surprising that there are religious people who have no
objection to innocent amusements or to drama as drama, yet regard the
theatre as causing a great deal of immorality in the way already
indicated.
The Censor, not the present occupant of the post, at one time interfered
and dealt with the question of costume at the Lyceum in the pre-Irving
days, but his efforts were a failure, and, as far as is publicly known,
have not been renewed since. Lately the degree of nudity considered
permissible has been largely increased. The Salome dancers built a
bridge of beads across what was regarded as a fixed gulf: it is
difficult for stern moralists to stomach the _danse du ventre_.
The next aspect of the matter is that the tendency of the stage, broadly
speaking, is to preach a kind of conventional morality somewhat below
the standard considered admissible by serious people; one may go
further, and say that plays have been produced, particularly French
plays, such as the clever works of M. Capus, in which the accepted
ideas of the sanctity of marriage are treated with contempt. Some works
of this character have been translated and played at first-class
theatres, and in popular dramas of the _Zaza_ and _Sapho_ type we were
invited to grieve over the disappointments in lawless love of women
quite shameless in character.
For years past a large proportion of plays have concerned themselves
with the question of the seventh commandment; and whilst, as a rule, in
order to dodge the Censor, it is pretended that no actual breach has
occurred, the audience know that this is merely a pretence. In a large
number of these plays the question of adultery is handled so facetiously
as to tend to cause people to regard it as a trivial matter; whilst in
numbers of the others, where the matter is handled more seriously, the
actual consequences of sin are of such little inconvenience to the
sinners that, although theoretically the plays preach a moral, the
actual lesson is of no weight at all.
A curious aspect of the matter is that theatredom, as appears from the
bulk of the evidence before the Censorship Commission, is opposed to the
class of play in which the proposition is preached that "the wages of
sin is death." Plays like _Ghosts_ and _A Doll's House_--as far as the
episode of Nora's hopeless lover is concerned--and the works of that
fierce moralist M. Brieux are banned by most of official theatredom, and
some of them are censored. In fact, the whole note of the theatre is
that gloomy or painful matters should be excluded. It is not too much to
say that the theatre insists strongly upon being regarded simply as a
place of entertainment, and objects almost savagely to dramas which
really show sin as ugly and vice as harmful, both to the vicious and
innocent; it refuses to be a moralizing institution, and those who seek
to justify such an attitude do so by claiming that it is a branch of art
and not morals.
No doubt there are exceptions. We have had _Everyman_ upon the stage,
and _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, in which the highest morality
is preached, and in _The Fires of Fate_ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a
sincere effort to use the stage for noble purposes; nor would it be
difficult to multiply instances. Moreover, it may be claimed that the
dramas of Shakespeare, on the whole, have a high standard of morality
which might satisfy the Church, and they play a considerable part on our
modern stage; yet, speaking with a really substantial knowledge of the
subject, one may say confidently that, despite much that is good and
admirable, the balance is seriously to the bad. Our theatre does a
little good and a great deal of harm.
It is possible that views such as these may be in the minds of those who
wrote the circular of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, and if so they
were justified in writing. If, on the other hand, they were merely
actuated by the Puritanic idea that drama and the theatre are
necessarily immoral, we strongly dissent, for the drama might be made a
very powerful influence for good, and this renders the more regrettable
the fact that, although in some respects there is a little advance
towards the good, it is very slow, and it is doubtful whether the
balance will be turned in our time. There is a greater advance in art
than in morality as far as the theatre is concerned, but even in art the
progress is very disappointing.
An Advantage of French Dramatists
There are many people who entertain the idea that modern French drama is
better than modern English drama; and from this it seems a natural
deduction that the French playwrights of to-day are abler than their
contemporary English dramatists. A study of the large collection of
French plays produced at the New Royalty Theatre by M. Gaston Mayer, as
well as those presented under other managements during the last few
years, and some knowledge of those which have not crossed the unamiable
Channel, causes me to wonder. The careless may make the mistake of
comparing the imported French pieces with the average English plays;
this, of course, is absurd, since only the successful foreign works are
played over here; consequently, for purposes of fair comparison, one
must eliminate not only our failures but our plays of average merit.
Even after the process of elimination has been made there lurks the
danger of error, for when comparing the efforts of our playwrights with
those of Paris one is making a comparison between men working under a
heavy handicap and men unburdened by it. There is a whole world, or at
least a whole half-world, open freely to the French writer into which
the English dramatist is only permitted to crawl furtively. A large
proportion of the foreign works in question, if faithfully translated
and presented in London, would cause a howl of horror, based on the
proposition that some of them are immoral and some are indelicate, and
many both.
No sane people pretend to agree with the observation of some celebrated
person, to the effect that anybody can be witty who is willing to be
indecent; it is not more universally true than the proposition that no
one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. Nevertheless
there is something in it. Many real witticisms are indecent; some
profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the
authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be
indecent or immoral.
Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English
dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama
available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of
local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ
the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of
subjects and ideas open to his competitor. In other words, the
Englishman's stock may be regarded as _x_, and the Frenchman's as _x_ +
_y_, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local
humour on the other.
Now _y_, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by
many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown
tired of _x_, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine
themselves to this far from unknown quantity. Thackeray is said to have
regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our
playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor
British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal
plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really
his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such
brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by
means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the
playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round
a little track of conventional morality.
It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French
dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles--but
they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas _fils_ were sincere moralists
according to their points of view, though the methods of their
moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the
importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and
filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family--an idea
deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country.
On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a
queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their ideas
of social and family life and their view of the sanctity of true
marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless
passion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as _Le
Mariage d'Olympe_ and _La Femme de Claude_, which has the memorable
preface with the _Tue la_ phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters.
Their successors, putting aside such men as Brieux and Hervieu--whose
intentions are strictly honourable--may pretend to be moralists, but
they adopt an impudently unconventional attitude. They seem to modify
the phrase that "property is theft" into the proposition that "marriage
is a selfish monopoly." We have had play after play apparently based
upon a merely sensual idea of free love. Like their predecessors they
handle mud, and they handle it as Walton bade the angler handle the frog
when using it as bait. Some of them seem to have no prejudice in favour
of people who try to exercise decent self-restraint. Without pleading
their cause, one must point out that in the domain of lawless passion
there are hundreds of thrilling or vastly comic situations at the
command of the dramatist, whether he be moralist or simply
boulevardier. No wonder then that there seem to be far more original
plays in France than in England.
The advantage of the foreigners is even greater in the matter of
dialogue than subject. With the aid of tact and certain elaborate
conventions the English dramatist is able to handle many of his
competitor's themes and has contrived to adapt some of his forward, if
hardly advanced, plays and by ridiculous changes decidedly emasculating
them, has succeeded in presenting a sort of version of a number of the
saucy farces. The dialogue baffles him.
It cannot be denied that a great deal of the dialogue of French plays is
very funny, rather shocking, and not exactly gross. As a rule the more
distinguished writers avoid the tone of the _joyeusetés_ of an Armand
Sylvestre, a writer capable of using bluntly without acknowledgement the
crudest of Chaucer's tales and also of writing beautiful poetry quite
free from offence; but even when the humbler _gauloiseries_ are
neglected the finer indelicacy is employed, and the men laugh and ladies
pretend to put up their fans. Nobody, perhaps, is at all worse, for the
_jeune fille_ is only taken to carefully selected plays, except at the
seaside, where in the casino she attends performances of works that in
Paris she would not be allowed to see; and, moreover, there is truth in
what a French manager once shrewdly observed--"Those who can't
understand the jokes won't be hurt, and those who can, can't."