Dandin, the judge in Racine’s comedy of _Les Plaideurs_, offers to
amuse Isabelle by the spectacle of a little torturing. “Eh! Monsieur,”
exclaims Isabelle, “eh, Monsieur, peut on voir souffrir des malheureux?”
and Dandin, in his reply, speaks for a by no means negligible proportion
of the human race: “Bon! cela fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.”
Dandin was a Guignolite.
We all have our Guignolite moments, moments of Taine’s “ferocious
gorilla” surviving in civilized man, when we seek the spectacle of
torture or physical suffering or violent death; but we are careful to
æsthetize them, refine them into moments of poetry or art. The pleasure
of tragedy is æsthetic. Nevertheless, tragedy involves violent death,
and without that would be an idle tale. So Rousseau was not altogether
wrong when he said we go to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others
suffer, without suffering ourselves. Your true Guignolite simply prefers
his tragedy “neat,” without æsthetic dilution. But I think it is unfair
to charge him, as he is so often charged, with a love of the horrible for
its own sake. I think, rather, that he is moved, a little more actively
than the rest of the world, by curiosity.
It is customary to talk of curiosity as though it were essentially
ignoble. Children, women, and savages are said to have most of it. It
accounts for “fortune-telling,” prophetic almanacs, spiritualistic
_séances_ and other forms of alleged communication with the dead. But
the truth is, curiosity, the desire to enlarge experience, is a highly
valuable, or, rather, indispensable, human attribute. Without it there
could be no science, no progress, and finally no human life at all. And
you cannot restrict it. It must crave for all forms of experience. Some
of us will be sweeping the heavens for new stars, and others will want to
peep into Bluebeard’s cupboard. More particularly we are curious to know
what is already known to others. We desire to see with our own eyes what
others have seen and reported to us. That is why so many people have gone
to _Chu Chin Chow_. We wish to realize for ourselves, by the direct aid
of our own senses, “What it’s like.” And the more difficult it is to see,
the greater the secrecy, the intimacy, of its actual happening in life,
the greater our curiosity to see a picture or other representation of
it. Hence the vogue of stage bedroom scenes, newspaper portraits of “the
victim” and “the place of the crime,” and Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
I believe that is why “cela”—the horrible, the dreadful, the
gruesome—“fait toujours passer une heure ou deux” for your Guignolite.
It satisfies his curiosity about an experience which in real life it is
rare or difficult to obtain. For instance, they have been showing at the
London Grand Guignol a representation of a criminal’s last half-hour
before execution. Time was when you could see that for yourself, follow
the prisoner in the cart to Tyburn, and offer him nosegays or pots
of beer. In that time, enjoying the real thing, you wanted no mimic
representation of it. For stage purposes you only cared to have it
fantasticated—as in _The Beggar’s Opera_. To-day you cannot (unless you
are a prison official or the hangman himself) enjoy the real thing; the
Press is excluded; so you seek the next best thing, a realistic stage
picture of it. “Realistic,” I say. That is the merit of Mr. Reginald
Berkeley’s _Eight o’Clock_, wherein there is not a trace of staginess or
imported sentiment. He gives you what you are looking for, the nearest
substitute for the real thing. You are shown, as accurately as possible,
“what it’s like.” You see how the warders behave, and how the chaplain
and how the prisoner—with the result that you feel as though, for that
terrible half-hour, you had been in Newgate yourself. You have gone
through an experience which in actual life (let us hope) you will never
have. Your curiosity has been satisfied.
And I think realism will have to be the mainstay of the Grand Guignol
programmes. There is another “shocker” in the bill, _Private Room No. 6_,
by a French author, M. de Lorde, which seemed to me not half so effective
as the other because it was largely tinged with romance. Here again was
an attempt to gratify curiosity about an unusual experience. The incident
was distinctly “private and confidential.” How many of us have had the
chance of seeing a fiercely-whiskered Muscovite kissing and biting a
(conveniently _décolletée_) lady on the shoulder, subsequently swallowing
a tumblerful of kummel at a draught, and presently being strangled by
the lady’s glove? This, you may say, was realistic enough, but what made
it romantic, theatrical, was the obviously artificial arrangement of the
story, the “preparations,” the conventional types. You knew at once you
were in the theatre and being served with carefully calculated “thrills.”
That is to say, your curiosity was solely about what was going to happen
next in the playwright’s scheme—the common interest of every stage
plot—which is a very different thing from curiosity about strange, rare,
experiences in actual life. You felt that Mr. Berkeley had really shown
you “what it’s like.” You felt that M. de Lorde had only shown you what
his skill in theatrical invention was like.
And there, I suspect, we reach a limitation of Grand Guignolism. The
art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished
from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best
drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going
to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing
shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. The Greek
tragedians did not scruple to announce their plot in advance. Lessing,
in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” maintains that “the dramatic interest is
all the stronger and keener the longer and more certainly we have been
allowed to foresee everything,” and adds, “So far am I from holding
that the end ought to be hidden from the spectator that I don’t think
the enterprise would be a task beyond my strength were I to undertake
a play of which the end should be announced in advance, from the very
first scene.” The truth is, in the fine art of drama we are seeking
what we seek in every fine art—beauty, a new form and colouring to be
given to the actions and emotions of the real world by the artist’s
imagination. But even on the lower plane of realism Grand Guignolism has
ample scope. The one-act formula has a clear technical advantage in the
single scene and strict coincidence of supposed with actual time, great
helps both to unity of impression. (One counted the minutes in _Eight
o’Clock_ almost as anxiously as the condemned man did.) And it has the
immense fun of theatrical experiment, of seeing how far you can go, what
shocks the public can stand and what it can’t, the joy of adventurously
exploring the unknown and the _inédit_. Above all, if it is wise it
will remember that (as I believe at any rate) its public does not yearn
for the “shocking” incident merely as such, but as representing a rare
experience, and it will look for some rarities that are not shocking.