analyzed the sources of laughter, Bergson recalled the old story
of the man in church who remained dry-eyed when the rest of the
congregation were dissolved in tears by the pathos of the sermon
and who explained his failure to be moved as due to the fact that
he did not “belong to that parish.” And Bergson asserted that
this explanation, absurd as it may seem, is not unsatisfactory or
illogical, if applied to laughter rather than to tears. “However
hearty a laugh may be,” the French philosopher declared, “it always
conceals an afterthought of complicity with other laughters, real or
imaginary.”
So it is that when the spectators refuse to become accomplices
before the fact, there is no certainty that they will respond to
the wit or to the humor of the play they are witnessing. Only when
they have yielded themselves to a communal intimacy, so to call
it, can the dramatist find an immediate appreciation of his merry
jests. Shakspere spoke out of abundant experience as player and as
playwright when he declared that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the
ear of him that hears it.” And Goethe was no less shrewd when he
asserted that “nothing is more significant of men’s character than
what they find laughable.”
III
The French, who have an armory of critical terms both more exact and
more abundant than ours, distinguish between three different kinds of
stage humor. There is, first of all, the mere witticism, the sentence
laughable in itself, the so-called epigram; and this they term the
_mot d’esprit_. Second, there is the phrase which derives its comic
effect not from itself but from its utterance at a given moment in
the movement of the story; and this they speak of as the _mot de
situation_. Thirdly, there is the word or the sentence whereby a
character expresses himself unexpectedly, unconsciously turning the
flashlight on the unexplored recesses of his own soul; and they are
wont to call this the _mot de caractère_.
It is the first of these, the witticism existing for its own sake and
sufficient with itself, detachable from the dialog, not integrated
with either character or situation, merely a merry jest at large, it
is verbal glitter of this sort which is essentially juvenile, which
we may expect in the piece of ’prentice playwrights and which we
find in the early comedies of Shakspere; more especially in ‘Love’s
Labor’s Lost.’
Thomas Moore, in his brilliant biography of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, called attention to the fact that English comedy, from
the ‘Way of the World’ to the ‘School for Scandal,’ was the work of
young men, who either died before they attained intellectual maturity
or abandoned the theater; and in the juvenility of these comic
playwrights, from Congreve to Sheridan, we can see the explanation
and the excuse for the verbal fireworks which explode all down
their dialog. So the younger Dumas was under thirty when he wrote
the ‘Demi-Monde’ with its elaborately paraded epigram; and he was
over fifty when he composed ‘Françillon’ with its dialog bathed in
wit and yet devoid of detachable dewdrops. So Oscar Wilde left us
only the comedies composed when he was comparatively youthful; and
he had perforce to give up playwriting before he had attained to
artistic sincerity. His epigrams, often amusing in themselves, are
half of them taken out of his note-book to be tacked arbitrarily into
his dialog. They may glitter like spangles but they are only sewed
on. The built up repartees and the manufactured retorts of Wilde’s
characters are sometimes too rude to be probable in the polite
society which the author took a snobbish pride in putting into his
plays; but at least they lacked the bare brutality of the rejoinders
we find in Congreve’s comedies and more particularly in Wycherly’s,
rejoinders which recall Goldsmith’s criticism of Johnson as a
conversationalist, that “whenever the doctor’s pistol misses fire, he
knocks you down with the butt.”
Even Sir Arthur Pinero in his juvenile pieces fell victim to a
prevailing epidemic of epigram. At least, I can adduce one specimen
of his youthful effort in his very youthful play, ‘Imprudence.’ As it
was unsuccessful it has remained unpublished, and I must therefore
rely on my memory. The lovers have quarreled and parted forever. This
is at an afternoon tea; and when the time comes for the young lady
to go home, the young gentleman approaches her with the courteously
formal query, “Shall I call you a hansom?” To which she retorts, “You
are mean enough to call me anything!” Many things, no doubt, must be
pardoned to a young lady who is desperately in love and who has just
broken with her devoted lover; but this impossible repartee is not
one of them. Sir Arthur Pinero’s dialog in his later social dramas
is nervous, tense, highly individual, and totally devoid of these
outgrown artificialities; and in them he evokes laughter by the clash
of character on character. His piercing sayings are the product of
essential wisdom and not of external wit.
It is evidence of Molière’s early maturity that there are no _mots
d’esprit_ even in his most brilliant comedies. He eschewed the
empty witticism; and in his ‘Criticism of the School for Wives’ he
explained with conscious pride that the jokes in his dialog were not
put there for their own sake; they were meant to illustrate situation
and character. Molière has his clever sayings, his epigrams and his
aphorisms, but they are always germane; they are _mots de situation_
and _mots de caractère_, and never merely _mots d’esprit_. More
than any other comic dramatist does Molière deserve the praise that
William Archer once bestowed on Bronson Howard, that his good things
grow out of his story, “like blossoms on a laburnum,” and are not
“stuck on like candles on a Christmas tree.”
The same commendation may be given to Sir James Barrie, who has now
come into his own and has conquered his juvenile tendency to get
his laugh by whimsicalities lugged in by main strength,—like the
husband’s amputation of the excrescences of his wife’s hat, in the
‘Professor’s Love Story.’ In the later ‘Dear Brutus’ the whole fabric
of the story is whimsical and fantastic, fanciful and delightful. To
a play like this we may apply Goethe’s characterization of Claude
Lorraine’s faery palaces, that it was “absolute truth—without a sign
of reality.” At its performance little ripples of intimate laughter
ran around the audience, never breaking into a unanimous guffaw.
The humor of the dialog may be, as indeed it must be, the humor of
Barrie himself; but it seems to us the spontaneous utterance of the
character from whose mouth it comes.
IV
The _mot de caractère_, the word or the sentence whereby a character
expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the
American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient
stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope
and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it
is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful
discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a
large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff
in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he
had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else
Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet
modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth
without letting fall the word _humor_. “That’s the humor of it” is
not at all humorous to-day.
But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said
yet once more, may be made to serve as a _mot de caractère_, as
a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’
when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly
adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and
held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he
doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is
exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth
again and again in that particular predicament.
In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that
galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its
utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by
itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor
is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since
I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less
have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.
When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the
Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of
glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate
stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a
fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at
least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled
for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”
The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the
‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it
so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen
upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic
achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns
that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years
since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing
himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the
annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a
bank!”
It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples
illustrate the _mot de caractère_ or the _mot de situation_, since
they illuminate both character and situation. But the _mot de
situation_ can exist independently, relying for its effect solely
upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten
farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of
the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous.
A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the
operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his
clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited
expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.”
This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from
the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb
fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the
spectators.
V
Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to draw a hard and fast
line between qualities which are closely akin, between talent and
genius, for example. We are told that “talent does what it can and
genius does what it must”; and this sounds impressive, no doubt, but
it does not get us any forwarder. It implies a distinction in kind
which is difficult to prove. So it is with the corresponding attempts
to distinguish sharply between wit and humor. We can see clearly
enough that many of Sheridan’s clever things are wit, beyond all
question; and we can also see that most of Molière’s clever things
are humor; but there remain not a few laughter-provoking effects
which it is almost impossible to classify. Perhaps some of them
cannot fairly be entitled either witty or humorous; they are just
funny.
In one of Charles Hoyt’s unpretending farcical comedies, all of
them unhesitatingly American, new births of our new soil, there was
a droll creature who found it amusing to purloin a succession of
articles from a certain house, crossing the stage again and again at
intervals bearing out the objects he was appropriating, the last of
these being nothing less than a red-hot stove. On one of his earlier
marauding expeditions he came before the audience with a huge ostrich
egg in one hand and with a tiny bantam chicken in the other. He came
down to the footlights and stood for a moment looking first at the
egg and then at the hen, with growing amazement. Finally he said,
“Well, I don’t believe it!”
Now, I cannot call the remark witty in itself, and I am not at all
sure that it is humorous; but it is funny,—at least this was the
unanimous opinion of the joyful audience. Equally funny was a brief
scene in another of the nondescript spectacles of Weber and Fields.
There was on one side of the stage, not too near the footlights,
the portico of a house, over which was a ground glass globe with
an electric bulb inside it. Weber and Fields came on together; and
Weber remarked, as they faced the audience: “This is his house. I
know it because he told me it had a white light over the door.”
(For the benefit of my readers I shall spare them the dialect which
intensified the flavor of the ensuing dialog.)
“A white light?” said Fields. “I didn’t see a white light.” At that
moment the globe became red just as Fields turned to look at it.
“That isn’t a white light,” he asserted when he again faced the
audience. “It’s a red light!”
“I tell you it’s a white light. I saw it,” said Weber; and when he
twisted his head to steal a glimpse of the globe it had again changed
its color. “I bet you five dollars it is a white light!”
“Five dollars?” cried Fields looking over his shoulder at the light,
which had then become red. “I bet you ten dollars it is a red light!”
“Ten dollars?” shouted Weber, “I—I—” Then he cautiously stole a look
at the globe, which was once more innocent of any color. “I bet you
fifty dollars it is a white light!”
When Fields, in his turn, looked back the globe was red, and he
instantly raised his bet to a hundred dollars.
I forget how high the wager mounted at last, each of the pair feeling
assured that he was betting on a certainty; but at last they had
wagered all they possessed and with the stakes in their hands,
they slowly revolved to gaze at the light together. But to their
astonished dismay, and to the vociferous delight of the spectators,
the light over the door was green!
“What can we do?” asked the saddened Weber. “We have both of us lost!”
And the saddened Fields answered, “We must throw the money away!”
What helps to make this pleasant scene even more pleasing is that the
audience was never supplied with any explanation as to the cause of
the changes of the color of the lights. That remains to this day a
dark mystery.
VI
This may not be witty, and it may even not be humorous, but it was
funny. It provoked incessant laughter in its progress to its apex,
which was greeted with uncontrollable roars. And laughter, like
that, clean and simple and honest, is a thing to be thankful for.
It is what Artemus Ward called “a sweet, sweet boon.” It needs no
apology and no explanation; it is its own excuse for being,—even if
it resists classification. It is wholesome and hygienic; and as Henry
Ward Beecher declared, “Whoever and wherever and however situated a
man is, he must watch three things,—sleeping, digestion and laughing.
They are three indispensable necessities.”
(1919)
XII
THE “OLD COMEDIES”
XII
THE “OLD COMEDIES”
I
It was in 1861 that Wallack’s Theater moved uptown from Broadway and
Broome Street to Broadway and 13th Street and that the management
passed from the hand of James W. Wallack to that of his son, Lester
Wallack. In 1882 Wallack’s Theater made another migration, from
Broadway and 13th Street to Broadway and 30th Street; and in this
third and final home the company failed to find itself as attractive
as it had been when it was lower downtown. Lester Wallack had to
relinquish its control; and he was glad to accept as a provision
for his declining years the proceeds of an all-star performance of
‘Hamlet’ given for his benefit with Edwin Booth as Hamlet and with
Joseph Jefferson as the First Gravedigger.
It was in 1879 while the company was still in its second home, at
Broadway and 13th Street, that Lester Wallack made a remark to me
which helped to explain why his enterprize came to grief not long
after it was transplanted to Broadway and 30th Street. He declared
rather plaintively that the management of a theater in New York was
in 1879 far more difficult than it had been in his father’s time.
“We used to bring out the latest London success,” he told me, “and
to revive the Old Comedies, and with a play now and then from Dion
[Boucicault] or from John [Brougham], we got through the season very
well. But I don’t really know now what people want.”
It was because he did not know what the people of New York wanted
that he had to give up the management of his theater and to accept a
benefit performance arranged for him by his friendly rivals, Augustin
Daly and A. M. Palmer. Altho he had been born in New York Lester
Wallack was always proud to consider himself an Englishman. So it was
that he remained an alien in the city of his birth, unresponsive to
the shifting currents of American life and unaware that the playgoers
of New York were slowly surrendering their former habit of colonial
dependence upon London. Wallack was so insistently English that he
never found himself at home in an American part in an American play;
and perhaps he may have felt that he was not really qualified to
pass on the merits of a drama dealing with the life of this country.
Brougham and Boucicault, Irishmen both, had each of them a far
better understanding of American likes and dislikes than Wallack had,
altho such an understanding is, of course, absolutely necessary to
the manager of a New York theater.
His more energetic rivals in management, Daly and Palmer, often
outbid him for the acquisition of the “latest London success,” and
they also made direct arrangements to acquire the latest Paris
success, whereas Wallack waited until this French piece had been
transmogrified into a British piece, almost as foreign to the
traditions of the American people as the French original had been. In
time Dion and John ceased to supply him with occasional new plays.
So it was that he was reduced to the third of his three sources of
supply, the Old Comedies. In so doing he was for a while secure from
rivalry, altho Daly was soon to become a vigorous and dangerous
competitor in this field, which Wallack had long thought to be his
exclusive property.
What were these Old Comedies that Wallack mentioned airily and with
assurance that his hearer would know exactly what he meant? I can
see how the youthful playgoer of to-day might be completely puzzled
if called upon to explain this term, perfectly familiar to playgoers
who were youthful two score years ago. I can hear this youthful
playgoer of to-day asking for a catalog of these Old Comedies and
for a list of their authors. And I can imagine him wondering also
why it is that he has rarely had a chance to see these Old Comedies
which delighted the lovers of the acted drama in the days of his
grandfather.
II
The Old Comedies, so called, were a selected group of successful
plays which had been produced in the eighteenth century, most of them
(altho a few first saw the light of the lamps in the first half of
the nineteenth century) and which had survived on the stage, being
acted at irregular intervals at the Haymarket Theater in London,
at Wallack’s and later at Daly’s Theater in New York, and at the
Boston Museum. Curiously enough, no one of Shakspere’s humorous
pieces, lovely comedies and lively farces, was included in the
catalog of the Old Comedies, altho they were a century older than
the youngest of these Old Comedies; and no one of the comic plays of
Shakspere’s contemporaries, no comedy-of-humors by Ben Jonson, no
dramatic-romance by Beaumont and Fletcher, was regularly enrolled in
this special repertory. And, what is even more curious, no one of
the comedies of the Restoration, no brilliant and brutal satire by
Congreve or Wycherly, no ingenious intrigue by Vanbrugh or Farquhar,
had been able to keep the stage and to demand inclusion in this
rigorous selection from out the comic masterpieces of the English
drama. It may be noted, in a parenthesis, that Daly did revive
two of Farquhar’s amusing plays, the ‘Recruiting Officer’ and the
‘Inconstant’; but these revivals were due to Daly’s own taste and
neither of these bold and brisk pieces could claim admission to the
recognized group of Old Comedies.
Now, if this group did not include any of the humorous pieces of the
Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration dramatists, what plays did it
contain? And no two students of stage-history would agree on the
answer to this question. No council was ever empowered to regulate
the canon and to prepare a final list of the comic dramas demanding
inclusion. The repertory of the Haymarket was not exactly the same as
that of Wallack’s, which in its turn did not coincide absolutely with
that of the Boston Museum. Yet it is safe to say that every student
of stage-history would be likely to put on his list most of the
plays which I now venture to include in mine. I find fifteen pieces
produced in the eighteenth century which I feel compelled to catalog
as truly Old Comedies:
Cibber’s ‘She Would and She Would Not’ (1703).
Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Busybody’ (1709).
Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Wonder’ (1717).
Garrick’s ‘High Life Below Stairs’ (1759).
Colman’s ‘Jealous Wife’ (1761).
Foote’s ‘Liar’ (1762).
Garrick and Colman’s ‘Clandestine Marriage’ (1766).
Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ (1773).
Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ (1775).
Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal’ (1777).
Sheridan’s ‘Critic’ (1779).
Mrs. Cowley’s ‘Belle’s Stratagem’ (1780).
Holcroft’s ‘Road to Ruin’ (1792).
O’Keefe’s ‘Wild Oats’ (1794).
Colman the Younger’s ‘Heir at Law’ (1797).
This list calls for two immediate comments. First, only two of these
plays have been acted in any New York theater in the past score
of years, that is to say, in the twentieth century; and therefore
playgoers under forty have not had the opportunity of seeing any of
the others performed by a professional company. Second, every one
of these plays was acted in New York during the final forty years
of the nineteenth century, some of them being produced at different
times by different companies in different theaters. For example, I
have had the pleasure in the course of a half-century of playgoing of
attending performances of the ‘School for Scandal’ at Wallack’s, at
Niblo’s, at the Union Square and at three different Daly’s theaters.
Perhaps a third comment is warranted, to the effect that my catalog
of Old Comedies includes specimens of almost every subdivision of
the comic drama. The ‘School for Scandal’ is the foremost example
in English of what has been called high-comedy, the humorous play
in which character is more important than story and of which the
plot is caused by the clash of character on character. ‘She Would
and She Would Not’ is a vivacious comedy-of-intrigue; and so is the
‘Belle’s Stratagem.’ The ‘Jealous Wife’ in some of its situations,
and the ‘Road to Ruin’ also, are almost too serious to be classed as
comic dramas. The ‘Critic’ and ‘High Life Below Stairs’ are frankly
farces, bustling with business and charged with high spirits. Even
the ‘Rivals’ and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ reveal themselves as closely
akin to farce, in so far as their respective actions are not caused
spontaneously by the volition of the characters but are arbitrarily
brought about by the author himself, visibly pulling the wires which
control the movements of his puppets. Probably it was the excessive
laudation bestowed on these two more or less farcical pieces of
Sheridan and Goldsmith which led Sir Arthur Pinero to formulate his
satiric definition: “A comedy is a farce by a deceased author.”