Audiences may be divided into first-nighters, second-nighters, and
general playgoers. All audiences are important, but first-nighters
most of all. Without them the acted drama would not begin to exist.
For obvious reasons, I have nothing but good to say of them. I wish to
live at peace with my neighbours. And I do not believe the malicious
story told about a manager, now dead, that he liked to fill the second
row of his stalls on first-nights with his superannuated sweethearts.
Nobody is fat or old in Ba-ath, and there are no superannuitants among
first-nighters.
I find, from Mr. Max Beerbohm’s entirely delightful book “Seven Men,”
that it is possible to get tired of first-nighters. I should never have
guessed it myself. But this is what he says:—“I was dramatic critic for
the _Saturday Review_, and, weary of meeting the same lot of people over
and over again at first nights, had recently sent a circular to the
managers, asking that I might have seats for second nights instead.” But
mark what follows:—“I found that there existed as distinct and invariable
a lot of second-nighters as of first-nighters. The second-nighters
were less ‘showy’; but then, they came more to see than to be seen, and
there was an air that I liked of earnestness and hopefulness about them.
I used to write a good deal about the future of the British drama, and
they, for their part, used to think and talk a great deal about it.
Though second-nighters do come to see, they remain rather to hope and
pray.” Because I have quoted I must not be understood as accepting Mr.
Beerbohm’s implied aspersion on first-nighters. It is all very well for
him. He has retired (the more’s the pity) from dramatic criticism. But I
take his account of second-nighters on trust, because the exigencies of
a daily newspaper prevent me from observing them for myself. Evidently
they, no more than first-nighters, are average playgoers.
Not that I would disparage the general playgoer. Indeed, I am not sure
that he is not, in another sense than Labiche’s, _le plus heureux des
trois_. I can speak for myself. Mind, I am saying nothing against
first-nighters. They are entirely admirable persons—I could never bring
myself, like Mr. Beerbohm, to call them a lot. But oh! the joy of being,
on holiday occasions, a general playgoer, of throwing one’s considering
cap over the mills, of garnering no impressions for future “copy,” of
blithely ignoring one’s better judgment, of going comfortably home from
the play, like everybody else, instead of dashing madly into a taxi for
the newspaper office! The play will be well on in its run, the comedian
will have polished up his jokes, the superfluities will have been cut
out, the programme girls will long since have given up leading the
applause, you won’t know a soul, and you won’t even bother to look at
the author’s name. You surrender your individuality and drift with the
crowd, or, in more pretentious language, merge yourself in the collective
consciousness.
Which reminds me. The general playgoer just because he is general, is
what Henry James called George Sand: remarkably accessible. Everybody
knows him. He is a public theme. Theorists won’t leave him alone. In
particular, the collective psychologists have marked him for their
prey. For them he typifies the theatrical “crowd,” with the peculiar
crowd characteristics these theorists profess to have scientifically
classified. Sarcey began it. Lemaître followed. And comparatively obscure
scribes have devoted attention to the general playgoer. They have said
that he is no philosopher; he cannot adopt a detached, impersonal,
disinterested view of life; he must take sides. Hence the convention of
the “sympathetic personage.” He has not the judicial faculty, is not
accustomed to sift evidence or to estimate probabilities. Hence the
convention of the “long arm of coincidence” and the convention that the
wildest improbability may be taken as the starting-point of a play. The
general playgoer, as such, is virtuous and generous; for we are all on
our best behaviour in public. And he insists upon a strict separation of
virtue and vice. He wants his personages all of a piece. The composite
characters, blends of good and evil, he refuses to recognize. Hence the
conventions of “hero” and “villain,” of “poetic justice” and of “living
happy ever afterwards.” Further, it has been suggested that a crowd of
general playgoers, having an individuality of its own, cannot but be
interested in that individuality, apart from all reference to the cause
which brought it together. Once assembled, it becomes self-conscious,
self-assertive. It finds itself an interesting spectacle. And the general
playgoer is not of the cloistered but of the gregarious type of mankind;
he must have bustle, the sense of human kinship brought home to him by
sitting elbow by elbow with his neighbours. The faculty of intellectual
attention is seldom high in such a temperament as this. Hence the
playwright has to _force_ the attention of a temperamentally inattentive
audience. Mark, once more, that I am not speaking of first-nighters.
Their individuality is too strong to be crowd-immersed. I would not
for worlds speak of them as a crowd at all. They are an assemblage, a
constellation, a galaxy. Admirable persons!
But there is one thing for which I envy the general playgoer above
all. I mean his freedom and pungency of criticism. Anonymity gives him
irresponsibility, and, his resentment at being bored not being subject
to the cooling process of literary composition, his language is apt to
be really terrible. Talk of printed criticism! Actors and authors do
talk of it often enough, and on the whole don’t seem to like it; but let
them mingle with the general playgoer and keep their ears open! Who was
the man in Balzac who said that it was absurd to speak of the danger of
certain books when we all had the corrupt book of the world open before
us, and beyond that another book a thousand times more dangerous—all that
is whispered by one man to another or discussed behind ladies’ fans at
balls? So the general playgoer is the great purveyor of secret criticism.
Disraeli, or another, said that the secret history of the world, which
never got into the history books, was the only true history. Let us hope
that secret criticism is not the only true sort, but it is certainly the
most live. It is free from the literary bias, the cant of criticism, the
smell of the lamp. And it is the most potent of persuasives. Published
criticism is powerless against it. The fate of a play is not decided by
newspaper criticisms (thank goodness! I should be miserable if it were),
but by what the general playgoers say to one another and pass on to their
friends. How many plays with “record” runs have been dismissed by the
newspapers on the morrow of the first night with faint praise or positive
dispraise? The general playgoer has said his say, and what he says
“goes.” I know he is giving many worthy people just now much uneasiness.
They form little theatrical societies _à côté_ to keep him out. They
deplore his taste and organize leagues for his education and improvement.
I rather fancy he is like the young lady in the play who “didn’t want
to have her mind improved.” But that is another story. What I have
been envying him for is not his taste but the heartiness with which he
“abounds in his own sense” and his freedom in expressing it. After all,
perhaps criticism that is so free and so pervasive and so potent is not
exactly to be called “secret.” I seek the _mot juste_. Or I would if that
were not a back-number. Has not Mr. Beerbohm finally put it in its place
as the Holy Grail of the nineties?