of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that
we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save
in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle
Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that
we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty
years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our
half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal
equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence
surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of
the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or
even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes
had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the
naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A
signal proof of their continued suppleness came but the other day when
we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English novelist, Mr. Percy
White, and it was the more signal because we perceived that he had
formed himself upon a method of Thackeray's, which recalled that master,
as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trollope recall a manner of
him. But it is Thackeray's most artistic method which Mr. White recalls
in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows
Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their
unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen
and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English
world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to
return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at
the first opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we have
fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and Dickens, we are confident
of being able to bear up under the heaviest-handed satire of _Vanity
Fair_. As for _The Luck of Barry Lyndon_ and _The Yellowplush Papers_,
and such like, they have never ceased to have their prime delight for
us. But their proportion is quite large enough to survive from any
author for any reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that
authors survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here
and there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes
are of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes.
We could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in
that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not
necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still read,
and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no longer read
the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth of the truly
great upon his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel
excellences in them. It was only the other day that we picked up
Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, and realized in it, from a chance page or
two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This was
something quite new to us in it. We had known the terrible pathos of the
story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless,
freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and
losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a
revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the
tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new."
Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. "And what is all this you have been
saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of what may
be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after the end
of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such danger? Or
was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied
something like that."
We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. "No, not exactly that. The
truth is we have been very much interested by your notion--if it was
yours, which is not altogether probable--and we have been turning its
light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call
self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one's self as the stuff
for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem. There
is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions."
"And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine?" the
veteran observer asked, with superiority.
"That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never so
tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that time of
life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden,
to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste--or taken a
new lease of an old one--for reading history, which had been dormant all
through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we
shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not
improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in
them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology----"
At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and that we
were talking to ourselves.
IV
THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE
A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from the
magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and
was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the rejected
from a function involving neither power nor responsibility.
"Ah!" we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the
hands of our friend. "What is it he won't take _now_?"
"Wait till I get my second wind," the victim of unrequited literature
answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the occupant had
risen; and he sighed, pensively, "I felt so sure I had got him this
time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the
uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure
to find rest in it that restored him to animation. "It is a little
thing," he murmured, "on the decline of the vaudeville."
"The decline of the vaudeville?" we repeated, wrinkling our forehead in
grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, "Do you
think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?"
"Why, bless my soul!" the rejected one cried, starting somewhat
violently forward, "what is your magazine itself but vaudeville, with
your contributors all doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or
travel, or sketches of life, or articles of popular science and
sociological interest, and I don't know what all! What are your
illustrations but the moving pictures of the kalatechnoscope! Why," he
said, with inspiration, "what are you yourself but a species of Chaser
that comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground for the
next month's performance by tiring out the lingering readers?"
"You don't think," we suggested, "you're being rather unpleasant?"
Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to see him restored to so
much cheerfulness, at any rate. "I think the notion is a pretty good
fit, though if you don't like to wear it I don't insist. Why should you
object to being likened to those poor fellows who come last on the
programme at the vaudeville? Very often they are as good as the others,
and sometimes, when I have determined to get my five hours' enjoyment to
the last moment before six o'clock, I have had my reward in something
unexpectedly delightful in the work of the Chasers. I have got into
close human relations with them, I and the half-dozen brave spirits who
have stuck it out with me, while the ushers went impatiently about,
clacking the seats back, and picking up the programmes and lost articles
under them. I have had the same sense of kindly comradery with you, and
now and then my patience has been rewarded by you, just as it has been
by the Chasers at the vaudeville, and I've said so to people. I've said:
'You're wrong to put down the magazine the way most of you do before you
get to those departments at the end. Sometimes there are quite good
things in them.'"
"Really," said the unreal editor, "you seem to have had these remarks
left over from your visit to the real editor. We advise you to go back
and repeat them. They may cause him to revise his opinion of your
contribution."
"It's no use my going back. I read finality in his eye before I left
him, and I feel that no compliment, the most fulsome, would move him.
Don't turn me out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. You are
the first act on the bill for me. I read the magazine like a Chinese
book--from the back. I always begin with the Easy Chair."
"Ah, now you are talking," we said, and we thought it no more than human
to ask, "What is it you have been saying about the vaudeville, anyway?"
The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. "I will just read--"
"No, no!" we interposed. "Tell us about it--give us the general drift.
We never can follow anything read to us."
The other looked incredulous, but he was not master of the situation,
and he resigned himself to the secondary pleasure of sketching the paper
he would so much rather have read.
"Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville-goer I have always been?"
We nodded. "We know how you are always trying to get us to neglect the
masterpieces of our undying modern dramatists, on the legitimate stage,
and go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you delight in."
"Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an inveterate vaudeville-goer,
for the simple reason that I find better acting in the vaudeville, and
better drama, on the whole, than you ever get, or you generally get, on
your legitimate stage. I don't know why it is so very legitimate. I have
no doubt but the vaudeville, or continuous variety performance, is the
older, the more authentic form of histrionic art. Before the Greek
dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit playwrights, or the
exquisitely conventionalized Chinese and Japanese and Javanese were
heard of, it is probable that there were companies of vaudeville artists
going about the country and doing the turns that they had invented
themselves, and getting and giving the joy that comes of voluntary and
original work, just as they are now. And in the palmiest days of the
Greek tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course, variety shows
all over Athens and Rome where you could have got twice the amusement
for half the money that you would at the regular theatres. While the
openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom Euripides and
Terence had cast for their parts were going through roles they would
never have chosen themselves, the wilding heirs of art at the vaudeville
were giving things of their own imagination, which they had worked up
from some vague inspiration into a sketch of artistic effect. No manager
had foisted upon them his ideals of 'what the people wanted,' none had
shaped their performance according to his own notion of histrionics.
They had each come to him with his or her little specialty, that would
play fifteen or twenty minutes, and had, after trying it before him, had
it rejected or accepted in its entirety. Then, author and actor in one,
they had each made his or her appeal to the public."
"There were no hers on the stage in those days," we interposed.
"No matter," the rejected contributor retorted. "There are now, and that
is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality,
to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my
paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath,
and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming
unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to
a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door,
and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat in the best place I can get,
away from interposing posts and persons, and settle down to a long
afternoon's delight, I like to fancy myself a far-fetched phantom of the
past, who used to do the same thing at Thebes or Nineveh as many
thousand years ago as you please. I like to think that I too am an
unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will be such as shaped smiles
immemorially gone to dust."
We made our reflection that this passage was probably out of the
rejected contribution, but we did not say anything, and our visitor went
on.
"And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for my fifty cents!
There were twelve stunts on the bill, not counting the kalatechnoscope,
and I got in before the first was over, so that I had the immediate
advantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly swinging himself
between two chairs which had their outer legs balanced on the tops of
caraffes full of water, and making no more of the feat than if it were a
walk in the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I respected that man! What
study had gone to the perfection of that act, and the others that he
equally made nothing of! He was simply billed as 'Equilibrist,' when his
name ought to have been blazoned in letters a foot high if they were in
any wise to match his merit. He was followed by 'Twin Sisters,' who, as
'Refined Singers and Dancers,' appeared in sweeping confections of white
silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading white hats, and
long-fringed white parasols heaped with artificial roses, and sang a
little tropical romance, whose burden was
'Under the bamboo-tree,'
brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced this romance with
languid undulations, and before you could tell how or why, they had
disappeared and reappeared in short green skirts, and then shorter white
skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their costumes, but always,
I am bound to say, of the refinement promised. I can't tell you in what
their refinement consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as I am
sure of the humor of the two brothers who next appeared as 'Singing and
Dancing Comedians' of the coon type. I know that they sang and they
danced, and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with the help of
the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue of the stage in
vaudeville. They were not so good as the next people, a jealous husband
and a pretty wife, who seized every occasion in the slight drama of 'The
Singing Lesson,' and turned it to account in giving their favorite airs.
I like to have a husband disguise himself as a German maestro, and
musically make out why his wife is so zealous in studying with him, and
I do not mind in the least having the sketch close without reason: it
leaves something to my imagination. Two of 'America's Leading Banjoists'
charmed me next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. If one
does not one's self rejoice in its plunking, there are others who do,
and that is enough for my altruistic spirit. Besides, it is America's
leading instrument, and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism
which is never really dormant in us. Its close association with color in
our civilization seemed to render it the fitting prelude of the next
act, which consisted of 'Monologue and Songs' by a divine creature in
lampblack, a shirt-waist worn outside his trousers, and an exaggerated
development of stomach. What did he say, what did he sing? I don't know;
I only know that it rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the
conscience, and appeased the hungerings of ambition. Just to sit there
and listen to that unalloyed nonsense was better than to 'sport with
Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neaera's hair,' or to be
the object of a votive dinner, or to be forgiven one's sins; there is no
such complete purgation of care as one gets from the real Afro-American
when he is unreal, and lures one completely away from life, while
professing to give his impressions of it. You, with your brute
preferences for literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you
would say I ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little
passage of drama, which followed, and I don't know but I did. It was
nothing but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away
from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of
an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at
once sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,'
and she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it
to sleep with 'By low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls to
sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends
by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I do
not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat with
pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple
instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words
of his to Guildenstern: 'You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound
me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... 'S blood, do you
think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' Guildenstern ought to
have said: 'Much, my lord! Here is an actor who has been summering in
the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than the
dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of drama as artless as a
child would fancy, and yet it swells your heart and makes you cry. Your
mystery? You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only fakes and
frauds who do not understand the soul. The simplest willow whistle is an
instrument more complex than man.' That is what I should have said in
Guildenstern's place if I had had Hamlet with me there at the vaudeville
show.
"In the pretty language of the playbill," the contributor went on, "this
piece was called 'A Pastoral Playlet,' and I should have been willing to
see 'Mandy Hawkins' over again, instead of the 'Seals and Sea Lions,'
next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately lifted on them.
Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their
accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar
too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of
a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in
extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large
and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the
difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself
holding my breath, and helping them along too strenuously for my
comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; their mere
flumping about the stage makes me unhappy; but they are not so bad,
after all, as trained dogs. They were followed by three 'Artistic
European Acrobats,' who compensated and consoled me for the seals, by
the exquisite ease with which they wrought the impossibilities of their
art, in the familiar sack-coats and top-coats of every day. I really
prefer tights and spangles, but I will not refuse impossibilities simply
because they are performed, as our diplomats are instructed to appear at
European courts, in the ordinary dress of a gentleman; it may even add a
poignancy to the pleasure I own so reluctantly.
"There came another pair of 'Singers and Dancers,' and then a 'Trick
Cyclist,' but really I cannot stand trick cycling, now that plain
cycling, glory be! has so nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began
to make his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round the stage
in that posture, I went away. But I had had enough without counting him,
though I left the kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and shimmering
unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, such as I could
have got at no legitimate theatre in town, and I came away opulently
content."
We reflected awhile before we remarked: "Then I don't see what you have
to complain of or to write of. Where does the decline of the vaudeville
come in?"
"Oh," the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, "I forgot that. It's
still so good, when compared with the mechanical drama of the legitimate
theatre, that I don't know whether I can make out a case against it now.
But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. I think the change
began insidiously to steal upon the variety show with the increasing
predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have
minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out,
when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic
musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of
reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days'
beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the
'playlets' began following one another in unbroken succession, I did not
know what to do. Almost before I was aware of their purpose three of the
leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave plays that took
up the whole afternoon; and though they professed to intersperse the
acts with what they called 'big vaudeville,' I could not be deceived,
and I simply stopped going. When I want to see a four-act play, I will
go to the legitimate theatre, and see something that I can smell, too.
The influence of the vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and
refining that its audiences cannot stand either the impurity or the
imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now the vaudeville itself is
beginning to decline in quality as well as quantity."
"Not toward immodesty?"
"No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual superiority of the
continuous performance is beginning to suffer contamination from the
plays where there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now of the
tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the variety houses. The comic
musician is of the rarest occurrence; during the whole season I have as
yet heard no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The most
dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. The acrobats still
abound, but it is three long years since I looked upon a coon act with
real Afro-Americans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur
overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a small wad of paper
in the air with one hand. It is true that the conquest of the vaudeville
houses by the full-fledged drama has revived the old-fashioned stock
companies in many cases, and has so far worked for good, but it is a
doubtful advantage when compared with the loss of the direct inspiration
of the artists who created and performed their stunts."
"Delightful word!" we dreamily noted. "How did it originate?"
"Oh, I don't know. It's probably a perversion of stint, a task or part,
which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does it
matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are
charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist's
own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves it. He seems never to be
tired of it, even when it is bad, and when nobody in the house lends him
a hand with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to go, and he
with it. It has to go when it is good, after it has had its day, though
I don't see why it should go; for my part there are stunts I could see
endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as much of any
play?"
"Gilbert and Sullivan's operas," we suggested.
"That is true. But without the music? And even with the music, the
public won't have them any longer. I would like to see the stunt fully
developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately
nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no
allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on
to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and
dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but
never-ending as the race itself."
"You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get," we
said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book
again. "But about the decline of vaudeville?"
"Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it
is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or
at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville
must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet
unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments, but the
enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to the whims
and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of men; for it
appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of art, but
instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is lost upon
the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow
of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the legitimate
theatres--"
"Then what you wish," we concluded, "is to elevate the vaudeville."
The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something between a
groan and a growl. "You mean to kill it."
V
INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA