‘THE BOX OFFICE.’
Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice,
The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please must please to live.
—_Samuel Johnson._
I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some
former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled
‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was
printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury
Square.
But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern
title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I
discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of
serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as
ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and
then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the
great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely
unappreciated and misunderstood.
Speaking of the actor and his profession, I pointed out that the only
real test of merit in an actor was the judgment of the Box Office, and
that therefore an actor is bound to play to a Box Office and succeed with
a Box Office if he wants to continue to be an actor.
The suggestion was received with contempt and derision. No artist, I
was told, no man of any character would deign to think of so low a
thing as the Box Office. All the great men of the world were men who
had had a contempt for the Box Office, and the Box Office is, and must
in its nature be, a lowering and degrading influence. This opinion
seemed so widely held that I decided to hold an inquest upon my original
suggestion, and the result of this, I need hardly say, was not only to
confirm me in the view that I was entirely right, but to convince me that
my neighbours were sunk in the slough of a dangerous heresy, in which it
was my duty to preach at them whilst they slowly disappeared in the ooze
of their unpardonable error.
There is something essentially English in the very name of the
institution—the Box Office. About the only thing an average Box Office
cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor
knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane
manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to
the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the
critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box
Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the
_vox populi_, which is far nearer the _vox Dei_ than the voice of the
expert witness.
Before discoursing of the Box Office in its widest sense, let us return
for a moment to the case of the actor. Here the Box Office must, in
the nature of things, decide his fate. It is the polling booth of the
playgoer, and it is the playgoer and not the critic who decides whether
an actor is great or otherwise. Why do we call Garrick a great actor?
Because the Box Office of his time acclaimed him one. Davies tells us
how his first performance of Richard III. was received with loud and
reiterated applause. How his ‘look and actions when he pronounced the
words,
Off with his head: so much for Buckingham,
were so significant and important from his visible enjoyment of the
incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the triumph
of the actor and satisfaction of the audience.’ A modern purist would
have walked out of the playhouse when his ear was insulted by Cibber’s
tag; but from a theatre point of view it is a good tag, and I have always
thought it a pity that Shakespeare forgot to set it down himself, and
left to Cibber the burden of finishing the line. The tag is certainly
deserving of this recognition that it was the line with which Garrick
first captured the Box Office, and it is interesting that the best
Richard III. of my generation, Barry Sullivan, always used Cibber’s
version, for the joy, as I take it, of bringing down the house with ‘so
much for Buckingham.’ Shakespeare was so fond of improving other folk’s
work himself, and was such a keen business man, that he would certainly
have adopted as his own any line capable of such good Box Office results.
Throughout Garrick’s career he was not without critics, and envious ones
at that; but no one to-day doubts that the verdict of the Box Office
was a right one, and it is an article of universal belief that Garrick
was a great actor. Of course one does not contend that the sudden
assault and capture of the Box Office by a young actor in one part is
conclusive evidence of merit. As the envious Quin said: ‘Garrick is a
new religion; Whitfield was followed for a time, but they would all come
to church again.’ Cibber, too, shook his head at the young gentleman,
but was overcome by that dear old lady, Mrs. Bracegirdle, who had left
the stage thirty years before Garrick arrived. ‘Come, come, Cibber,’ she
said, ‘tell me if there is not something like envy in your character of
this young gentleman. _The actor who pleases everybody must be a man of
merit._’ The old man felt the force of this sensible rebuke; he took a
pinch of snuff and frankly replied, ‘Why faith, Bracey, I believe you are
right, the young fellow is clever.’
In these anecdotes you have the critic mind annoyed by the Box Office
success of the actor, and the sane simple woman of the world laying down
the maxim ‘the actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ And
when one considers it, must it not necessarily be so? An actor can only
appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him
and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he
plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office
success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at
all?
So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in
setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor,
my position was indisputable. Of course, there were, and are, Box Offices
and Box Offices. Cibber, Quin, Macklin, and Garrick appealed to different
audiences from Foote. An actor to-day has a hundred different Box Offices
to appeal to, but the point and the only point is, does he succeed with
the Box Office he attacks? Moreover, the more Box Offices he succeeds
with and the greater the public he can amuse, the better actor he is.
Garrick knew this when, in the spirit of a great artist, he said: ‘If you
won’t come to Lear and Hamlet I must give you Harlequin,’ and did it with
splendid success.
How was it, then, when the thing seemed so clear to my mind, there should
be so many to dispute this Box Office test? The more one studied the
attitude of these unbelievers, the more certain it seemed that their
unbelief arose in a great measure as Cibber’s and Quin’s had arisen,
namely, from a certain spirit of natural envy. It is obvious that not
every one of us can achieve a great Box Office success, and that many
men who live laborious lives, without much prosperity of any kind, not
unnaturally dislike the success that an actor appears to attain so
easily. But the suggestion that Box Office success is or can be largely
attained by unworthy means is, it seems to me, a curious delusion of
the envious, insulting to the generation of which we are individuals,
inasmuch as it suggests that we are easily deceived and deluded, and
exhibiting unpleasantly that modern pessimism that spells—or should we
more accurately say smells?—degeneration. Garrick’s career is an eloquent
example of the fact that a great Box Office success can only be attained
by great attributes used with consummate power, and that pettiness and
meanness, chicanery and bombast are not the methods approved of by the
patrons of the Box Office.
Of course it will be said by the envious ‘This man is a great success
to-day, wait and see what the next generation think of him.’ But why
should a man act or paint or write for any other generation but his own?
Common sense suggests that many men can successfully entertain their
own generation, but that only the work of the rare occasional genius
will survive in the future. Luckily for all artists of to-day, this is
and always was a law of Nature; equally fortunate for artists of the
future, that nothing that is being done to-day is in the least likely to
interfere with the workings of that law in days to come.
There is undoubtedly a tendency—and probably there always has been a
tendency—to infer that because a man is rich therefore he is lucky, and
that a man who is successful is very likely a dishonest man; indeed,
it seems a common belief that to gain the verdict of the Box Office it
is necessary to do that which is unworthy. This idea being so widely
spread, it appears interesting to study the Box Office in relation to
other scenes in the human drama. What part does it play, for instance, in
literature or art or politics?
Of course, a writer or painter is in a somewhat different position from
an actor. He can, if he wishes, appeal to a much smaller circle, or, in
an extreme case, he can refuse to appeal at all to the generation in
which he lives and make his appeal to posterity. The statesman, however,
is perhaps nearer akin to the actor. Let us consider how statesmen and
politicians have regarded the Box Office, and whether it can fairly be
said to have exercised a bad influence on their actions.
And as Garrick is one of the high sounding names in the world of the
theatre, so Gladstone may not unfairly be taken as a type of English
politician, and it is curious that the whole evolution of his mind
is chiefly interesting in its gradual discovery of the fact that the
Box Office is the sole test of a statesman’s merit, that the _vox
populi_ is indeed the _vox Dei_, and that the superior person is of
no account in politics as against the will of the nation. As in the
theatre, so in politics, it is the people who pay to come in who have
to be catered for. In 1838, Gladstone was as superior—‘sniffy’ is the
modern phrase—about the Box Office as any latter-day journalist could
wish. He complimented the Speaker on putting down discussions upon
the presentation of petitions. The Speaker sagely said ‘that those
discussions greatly raised the influence of popular feeling on the
deliberation of the House; and that by stopping them he thought a wall
was erected—not as strong as might be wished.’ Young Mr. Gladstone
concurred, and quoted with approval an exclamation of Roebuck’s in
the House: ‘We, sir, are, or ought to be, the _élite_ of the people
of England, for mind; we are at the head of the mind of the people of
England.’
It took over forty years for Gladstone to discover that his early views
were a hopeless form of conceit, and that the only test of the merit of a
policy was the Box Office test. But when he recognised that the _élite_
of the people were not in the House of Commons, but were really in the
pit and gallery of his audiences, he never wearied of putting forward and
explaining Box Office principles with the enthusiasm, and perhaps the
exaggeration, of a convert.
Take that eloquent appeal in Midlothian as an instance:
We cannot (he says) reckon on the wealth of the country, nor
upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which
rank and wealth usually bring. In the main these powers are
against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever
there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a
narrow and sectional interest—apart from that of the country,
and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public,
there we have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above
all these and behind all these, there is something greater
than these: there is the nation itself. This great trial is
now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard
to rouse, but when roused, harder and still more hopeless to
resist.
Now here is the Box Office test with a vengeance. Not in its soundest
form, perhaps, because the really ideal manager would have found a piece
and a company that would draw stalls and dress circle as well as pit
and gallery. For Bacon says: ‘If a man so temper his actions as in some
of them he do content every faction, the music will be the fuller.’ But
Gladstone at that time had neither the piece nor the company for this,
and, great artist as he was, his music did not in later years draw the
stalls and dress circle; but having mastered the eternal Box Office
principle, this did not disconcert him, for he knew that of the two the
pit and gallery were sounder business for a manager who wanted to succeed
in the provinces and was eager for a long run.
This recognition by Mr. Gladstone of the Box Office as supreme comes with
especial interest when you consider that his education and instinct made
it peculiarly difficult for him to appreciate the truth. Disraeli jumped
at it more easily, as one might expect from a man of Hebrew descent, for
that great race have always held the soundest views on questions of the
Box Office. As a novelist, the novels he wrote were no doubt the best he
was capable of, but whatever may be their merits or demerits, they were
written with an eye to the Box Office and the Box Office responded. His
first appearance upon the political stage was not a success. The pit
and gallery howled at him. But this did not lead him to pretend that
he despised his audience, and that they were a mob whose approval was
unworthy of winning; on the contrary, he told them to their faces that
‘the time would come when they would be obliged to listen.’ A smaller man
would have shrunk with ready excuse from conquering such a Box Office,
but Disraeli knew that it was a condition precedent to greatness, and
he intended to be great. He had no visionary ideas about the political
game. As he said to a fellow-politician: ‘Look at it as you will, it is a
beastly career.’ Much the same may be said in moments of despondency of
any career. The only thing that ultimately sweetens the labour necessary
to success is the Box Office returns, not by any means solely because of
their value in money—though a man honest with himself does not despise
money—but because every shilling paid into the Box Office is a straight
testimonial from a fellow-citizen who believes in your work. Disraeli’s
Box Office returns were colossal and deservedly so—for he had worked hard
for them.
When you come to think of it seriously, the Box Office principle in
the drama of politics is the right for that drama’s patrons to make its
laws, a thing that this nation has contended for through the centuries.
Indeed, there are only two possible methods of right choice open: either
to listen to the voice of public opinion—the Box Office principle—or to
leave affairs entirely to the arbitrament of chance. With sturdy English
common sense we have embodied both these principles in an excellent but
eccentric constitution. We allow public opinion to choose the members of
the House of Commons, and leave the choice of members of the House of
Lords entirely to chance. To an outside observer both methods seem to
give equally satisfactory results.
In political matters we find that for all practical purposes the Box
Office reigns supreme. No misguided political impresario to-day would
plant some incompetent young actor into a star part because he was a
member of his own family. We may be thankful that all parties openly
recognise that any political play to be produced must please the pit
and gallery, and that any statesman actor, to be a success, must play
to their satisfaction. No one wants the stalls and dress circle of the
political circus to be empty, but it would be absurd to let a small
percentage of the audience exercise too great an influence on the
productions of the management.
As in politics, so in business, for here no sane man will be heard to
deny that the Box Office test is the only test of merit. If the balance
sheet is adverse, the business man may be a man of culture, brain-power,
intellect, sentiment and good manners, but as a business man he is not
a success, and Nature kindly extinguishes him and automatically removes
him from a field of energy for which he is unfitted. It is really
unfortunate that one cannot have a moral, social, and literary Bankruptcy
Court, where, applying the Box Office test, actors, authors, artists,
and statesmen might file their petitions and be adjudged politically,
or histrionically, or artistically bankrupt, as the case might be, and
obtain a certificate of the Court, permitting them to open a fried-fish
shop, to start a newspaper, or to enter upon some simpler occupation
which, upon evidence given, it might appear they are really fitted for.
It is the vogue to-day for those claiming to possess the literary and
artistic temperament to shrink with very theatrical emphasis from the
Box Office. They point out how the Box Office of to-day overrules the
Box Office of yesterday, forgetting that the Box Office of to-morrow may
reinstate the judgment of the inferior Court. Even if the Box Office is
as uncertain as the law, it is also as powerful as the law. Of course
a painter or writer has the advantage over the actor—if it be one—of
appealing to a smaller Box Office to-day, in the hopes of attracting a
large Box Office to-morrow. A man can write and paint to please a coming
generation, but a man cannot act, or bring in Bills in Parliament, or
bake or brew, or make candlesticks for anyone else than his fellow living
men. Not that, for myself, I think there have ever been many writers or
artists who wrote and painted for future generations. On the contrary,
they wrote and painted largely to please themselves, but in so far as
they cared for their wives and children, with an eye on the Box Office,
and in most cases it was only because their business arrangements were
mismanaged that their own generations failed to pay to come in. These
failures were the exception. The greatest men, such as Shakespeare and
Dickens, were immediate Box Office successes—others were Box Office
successes in their own day, but have not stood the test of time.
Nevertheless, it is something to succeed at any Box Office, even if the
success be only temporary. Every man cannot be a Prime Minister, but is
that any reason why he should not aspire to a seat on the Parish Council?
When one turns to the lives of authors and artists, one does not find
that the wisest and best were men who despised the test of the Box Office.
Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he
scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending
him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady
had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle
of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and
sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test
absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and
from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a
reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office
test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to
superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap
a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of
bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who
are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future
generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern
craze among the _cognoscenti_ to assess the ability of a writer or an
artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his
own generation.
If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one
would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and
recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box
Office success.
Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature,
writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:
I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays,
or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very
great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek
to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms
which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would
be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in
the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion
of every number, I am ensured _for_ that writing in every
number, a certain sum of money.
That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from
the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward
significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself.
As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of
America:
To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant
countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures;
to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great
mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me
in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not
barter for a mine of wealth.
Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds
and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the
backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages
can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood
the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to
pretend that he despised it.
Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle.
He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating
chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who
failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an
author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his
way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth
of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs
of genius at the hands of publishers.
What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body
of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of
all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand?
Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and
can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all
to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their
worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad,
saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine
to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value
of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals,
but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a
lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack
for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.
One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it
is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same
opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’
as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever
wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and
recognition have produced the best work that has been done.
Nor do we find that the painter is in this matter less sensible than his
artistic brethren. The late Sir John Millais expresses very accurately
the sensible spirit in which all great artists attend to the varied
voices of critics as against the unanimous voice of the Box Office.
I have now lost all hope of gaining just appreciation in the
Press; but thank goodness ‘the proof of the pudding is in
the eating.’ Nothing could have been more adverse than the
criticism on ‘The Huguenot,’ yet the engraving is now selling
more rapidly than any other of recent time. I have great faith
in the mass of the public, although one hears now and then such
grossly ignorant remarks.
The artist then gives instances of public criticism in other arts with
which he disagrees; but the only matter that I am concerned with is
that in his own art, and for himself, he has arrived at the Box Office
conclusion that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer
or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed,
or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large
numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote
their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good
of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to
find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no
necessity of appealing to that institution for support.
If I had been asked to name any writer of my own time who was absolutely
free from any truck with the Box Office, I should, before I had read
his charming autobiography, have suggested Herbert Spencer. For indeed
one would not expect to find a Box Office within the curtilage of a
cathedral or a laboratory. Religion and science and their preachers have
necessarily very little to do with the Box Office.
But Spencer was not only a great writer, but a keen scientific analyst of
the facts of human life. He could not deceive himself—as so many of the
literary folk do—as to his aims and objects. Looking back on the youthful
valleys of his life from the calm mountain slopes that a man may rest on
at the age of seventy-three, he asks himself
What have been the motives prompting my career? how much have
they been egotistic, and how much altruistic? That they have
been mixed there can be no doubt. And in this case, as in most
cases, it is next to impossible to separate them mentally in
such a way as to preserve the relations of amount among them.
So deep down is the gratification which results from the
consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of
the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is
impossible for anyone to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case,
the desire for such recognition has not been absent.
He continues to point out that this desire for recognition was ‘not the
primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive
of my larger and later efforts,’ and concludes, ‘Still, as I have said,
the desire of achievement, and the honour which achievement brings, have
doubtless been large factors.’
It is very interesting to note that a man like Herbert Spencer recognises
what a large part the Box Office played in his own work—work which was
rather the work of a scientist than the work of a literary man.
In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached,
emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they
were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children
and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run
all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember
that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding
human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye
may obtain.’
These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish
they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on
the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be
desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an
appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions
such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great
extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed
at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all
practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common
one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering
to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery,
is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his
self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A
study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the
two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are
summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.
It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in
some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of
a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box
Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared
among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and
spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they
may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were
troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would
not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there
are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are
busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness
they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone
else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the
Box Office principle.