Our Stage and Its Critics Part 11

Who doubts that a licensed English version of _Monna Vanna_ could have been prepared, although fully giving to the audience the meaning of the awful line, "_Nue sous son manteau_"? One may doubt the comic story that Mr Redford mistook the _sous_ for _sans_. The motto for the office, if it has a crest, should be the famous line from a music-hall song: "It ain't exac'ly wot 'e sez, it's the narsty way 'e sez it."

No wonder foreigners are puzzled by our theatre. The Parisian sees a Palais Royal farce played before an audience of which many members are girls in the bread-and-b.u.t.ter stage. In his great city maidens are--or, at least, were--not allowed to enter the theatre so long famous for its naughty farces. He gasps; he wonders whether the English _mees_ is as innocent as she looks--or used to look--and does not know the _perfide_ tongue of the _perfide Albion_ well enough to be aware that nothing shocking is said, and that it is pretended that the _cocotte_ is a mere kindly friend, the _collage_ a trifling flirtation, the _debauche_ a viceless lark, and that the foulest conduct of husband or wife does not reach a real breach of the commandment more often broken in England than the rest of the sacred ten.

The real sin of the Censor's office lies as much in what it permits as in what it forbids; and a growing sense of decency in the public is displacing prudery so that the abolition of the office will not cause the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his own thoughts.

Moral Effect on Audience

There was quite a pretty hubbub in theatredom caused by a circular letter of "The Church Pastoral Aid Society," calling upon inc.u.mbents and curates to regard theatrical performances as "a serious menace to the spiritual influence of the Church," and suggesting that in future they should refuse to take money raised by means of theatrical performances, or by bazaars or whist-drives or dances. Of course, all people connected with the theatres were very indignant at the insult implied; whilst, on the other hand, many parsons and Nonconformist ministers rushed into print and said very unflattering things about the stage.

The matter certainly had considerable public importance, and deserved to be considered in cold blood; and one may well raise, and attempt to answer, the plain question whether the Church is right or wrong in adopting an att.i.tude of hostility towards the stage. The question of grat.i.tude has been put forward, but is not really relevant: no doubt players and managers in the past have been very liberal with their services for charitable purposes, including matters specifically connected with churches, and although very often the actual motive of the liberality has been the desire for advertis.e.m.e.nt and notoriety--and the desire is natural and blameless--yet it is fair to a.s.sume that in many instances the real motive has been truly charitable. It is, however, obvious that a person might steal with the object of giving the money to a church restoration fund, and clearly his intention would not excuse his act nor enable the Church to endorse it. The plain question is whether the stage "makes for righteousness."

Into the very th.o.r.n.y question raised some years ago by Clement Scott with disastrous consequences to himself as to whether the stage is demoralizing to the actors and actresses we do not now propose to venture. Much has been said and written on the topic, but it is largely one of fact, which demands the examination of a great deal of evidence.

For the moment, then, let us merely discuss the question whether the effect of the stage on the audience is good or bad: in many cases there is no appreciable effect at all, and they may be eliminated.

Now, it must be admitted by all, save the extreme Puritans, that not only are there a great number of harmless pieces, but also many entirely moral in scope and aim, and likely to produce some good effect upon playgoers; but there are others. No doubt the famous _George Barnwell_ has gone out of date, and the d.i.c.k Turpin and Jack Sheppard plays, which did a great deal of harm, are not presented often in our days.

Nevertheless there are so many pieces still produced which in one way or another are injurious to playgoers as to render it fairly arguable that the effect of the stage as a whole is bad.

So long as religion enjoins the virtue of chast.i.ty, its professors must look with hostility upon the very numerous pieces in which women, young and beautiful, are presented in dresses radically immodest. It seems impossible to deny that the s.e.xual instincts of young men are often provoked to an extreme degree by the sight upon the stage of beautiful, half-nude young women; and it must be remembered that the spectacle is frequently accompanied by music of an erotic character. There is not the least doubt that the lighter musico-dramatic works and the pantomimes, in consequence of these matters, are the direct and immediate cause of many acts which religious people regard as acts of s.e.xual immorality.

The degree of nudity, of display of the human form in our theatres, and, of course, music-halls as well, to those unaccustomed to such matters is certainly quite startling, and by many people such displays are regarded as being entirely demoralizing to hot-blooded young men. It is, therefore, not surprising that there are religious people who have no objection to innocent amus.e.m.e.nts or to drama as drama, yet regard the theatre as causing a great deal of immorality in the way already indicated.

The Censor, not the present occupant of the post, at one time interfered and dealt with the question of costume at the Lyceum in the pre-Irving days, but his efforts were a failure, and, as far as is publicly known, have not been renewed since. Lately the degree of nudity considered permissible has been largely increased. The Salome dancers built a bridge of beads across what was regarded as a fixed gulf: it is difficult for stern moralists to stomach the _danse du ventre_.

The next aspect of the matter is that the tendency of the stage, broadly speaking, is to preach a kind of conventional morality somewhat below the standard considered admissible by serious people; one may go further, and say that plays have been produced, particularly French plays, such as the clever works of M. Capus, in which the accepted ideas of the sanct.i.ty of marriage are treated with contempt. Some works of this character have been translated and played at first-cla.s.s theatres, and in popular dramas of the _Zaza_ and _Sapho_ type we were invited to grieve over the disappointments in lawless love of women quite shameless in character.

For years past a large proportion of plays have concerned themselves with the question of the seventh commandment; and whilst, as a rule, in order to dodge the Censor, it is pretended that no actual breach has occurred, the audience know that this is merely a pretence. In a large number of these plays the question of adultery is handled so facetiously as to tend to cause people to regard it as a trivial matter; whilst in numbers of the others, where the matter is handled more seriously, the actual consequences of sin are of such little inconvenience to the sinners that, although theoretically the plays preach a moral, the actual lesson is of no weight at all.

A curious aspect of the matter is that theatredom, as appears from the bulk of the evidence before the Censorship Commission, is opposed to the cla.s.s of play in which the proposition is preached that "the wages of sin is death." Plays like _Ghosts_ and _A Doll's House_--as far as the episode of Nora's hopeless lover is concerned--and the works of that fierce moralist M. Brieux are banned by most of official theatredom, and some of them are censored. In fact, the whole note of the theatre is that gloomy or painful matters should be excluded. It is not too much to say that the theatre insists strongly upon being regarded simply as a place of entertainment, and objects almost savagely to dramas which really show sin as ugly and vice as harmful, both to the vicious and innocent; it refuses to be a moralizing inst.i.tution, and those who seek to justify such an att.i.tude do so by claiming that it is a branch of art and not morals.

No doubt there are exceptions. We have had _Everyman_ upon the stage, and _The Pa.s.sing of the Third Floor Back_, in which the highest morality is preached, and in _The Fires of Fate_ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a sincere effort to use the stage for n.o.ble purposes; nor would it be difficult to multiply instances. Moreover, it may be claimed that the dramas of Shakespeare, on the whole, have a high standard of morality which might satisfy the Church, and they play a considerable part on our modern stage; yet, speaking with a really substantial knowledge of the subject, one may say confidently that, despite much that is good and admirable, the balance is seriously to the bad. Our theatre does a little good and a great deal of harm.

It is possible that views such as these may be in the minds of those who wrote the circular of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, and if so they were justified in writing. If, on the other hand, they were merely actuated by the Puritanic idea that drama and the theatre are necessarily immoral, we strongly dissent, for the drama might be made a very powerful influence for good, and this renders the more regrettable the fact that, although in some respects there is a little advance towards the good, it is very slow, and it is doubtful whether the balance will be turned in our time. There is a greater advance in art than in morality as far as the theatre is concerned, but even in art the progress is very disappointing.

An Advantage of French Dramatists

There are many people who entertain the idea that modern French drama is better than modern English drama; and from this it seems a natural deduction that the French playwrights of to-day are abler than their contemporary English dramatists. A study of the large collection of French plays produced at the New Royalty Theatre by M. Gaston Mayer, as well as those presented under other managements during the last few years, and some knowledge of those which have not crossed the unamiable Channel, causes me to wonder. The careless may make the mistake of comparing the imported French pieces with the average English plays; this, of course, is absurd, since only the successful foreign works are played over here; consequently, for purposes of fair comparison, one must eliminate not only our failures but our plays of average merit.

Even after the process of elimination has been made there lurks the danger of error, for when comparing the efforts of our playwrights with those of Paris one is making a comparison between men working under a heavy handicap and men unburdened by it. There is a whole world, or at least a whole half-world, open freely to the French writer into which the English dramatist is only permitted to crawl furtively. A large proportion of the foreign works in question, if faithfully translated and presented in London, would cause a howl of horror, based on the proposition that some of them are immoral and some are indelicate, and many both.

No sane people pretend to agree with the observation of some celebrated person, to the effect that anybody can be witty who is willing to be indecent; it is not more universally true than the proposition that no one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. Nevertheless there is something in it. Many real witticisms are indecent; some profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be indecent or immoral.

Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of subjects and ideas open to his compet.i.tor. In other words, the Englishman's stock may be regarded as _x_, and the Frenchman's as _x_ + _y_, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local humour on the other.

Now _y_, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown tired of _x_, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine themselves to this far from unknown quant.i.ty. Thackeray is said to have regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round a little track of conventional morality.

It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles--but they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas _fils_ were sincere moralists according to their points of view, though the methods of their moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the importance of chast.i.ty and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family--an idea deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country.

On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their ideas of social and family life and their view of the sanct.i.ty of true marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless pa.s.sion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as _Le Mariage d'Olympe_ and _La Femme de Claude_, which has the memorable preface with the _Tue la_ phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters.

Their successors, putting aside such men as Brieux and Hervieu--whose intentions are strictly honourable--may pretend to be moralists, but they adopt an impudently unconventional att.i.tude. They seem to modify the phrase that "property is theft" into the proposition that "marriage is a selfish monopoly." We have had play after play apparently based upon a merely sensual idea of free love. Like their predecessors they handle mud, and they handle it as Walton bade the angler handle the frog when using it as bait. Some of them seem to have no prejudice in favour of people who try to exercise decent self-restraint. Without pleading their cause, one must point out that in the domain of lawless pa.s.sion there are hundreds of thrilling or vastly comic situations at the command of the dramatist, whether he be moralist or simply boulevardier. No wonder then that there seem to be far more original plays in France than in England.

The advantage of the foreigners is even greater in the matter of dialogue than subject. With the aid of tact and certain elaborate conventions the English dramatist is able to handle many of his compet.i.tor's themes and has contrived to adapt some of his forward, if hardly advanced, plays and by ridiculous changes decidedly emasculating them, has succeeded in presenting a sort of version of a number of the saucy farces. The dialogue baffles him.

It cannot be denied that a great deal of the dialogue of French plays is very funny, rather shocking, and not exactly gross. As a rule the more distinguished writers avoid the tone of the _joyeusetes_ of an Armand Sylvestre, a writer capable of using bluntly without acknowledgement the crudest of Chaucer's tales and also of writing beautiful poetry quite free from offence; but even when the humbler _gauloiseries_ are neglected the finer indelicacy is employed, and the men laugh and ladies pretend to put up their fans. n.o.body, perhaps, is at all worse, for the _jeune fille_ is only taken to carefully selected plays, except at the seaside, where in the casino she attends performances of works that in Paris she would not be allowed to see; and, moreover, there is truth in what a French manager once shrewdly observed--"Those who can't understand the jokes won't be hurt, and those who can, can't."

CHAPTER VIII

CASUAL NOTES ON ACTING

Mr H.B. Irving on his Art

To the reviewer of books fell the task of criticizing Mr H.B. Irving's book, "Occasional Papers," as literature. The dramatic critic has the right of considering the views expressed in it concerning the stage.

There are two essays of importance, from reading which one may learn the ideas, admirably expressed, of Mr Irving concerning his art--"The English Stage in the Eighteenth Century" and "The Art and Status of the Actor." The study of them, which they deserve, leads to certain conclusions hardly, it may be, antic.i.p.ated by the author.

In his defence of the actor's art against its detractors Mr Irving seems to ignore a fact which may be expressed in a phrase taken from the greatest of actor-dramatist-managers, and modified. There is acting and acting: the distinction is not merely in quality but also in kind. It would be difficult to define acting so as not to include the efforts of the music-hall artist, and even of the circus clown; any definition excluding them would be arbitrary, and also historically inaccurate. If, then, acting is to embrace these as well as the admirable performance of Mr Irving in _Hamlet_, disputes concerning the status of the actor as an artist must often arise.

In fact, until one reaches the actor's performance in dramas sincerely intended to be works of art, it is difficult to treat his art seriously.

A step farther: one cannot accept as a work of dramatic art a piece that does not seek to cause an illusion, or any play which formally admits the existence of the audience. A workable distinction may be found in using the terms "drama" and "entertainment," "actor" and "entertainer."

Mr Irving's essays lead to another distinction--artificial, no doubt. He speaks of the sixteenth century as "the century of great drama," of the seventeenth as "a century in which the interest shifts from the drama to its exponents, the players." The nineteenth, according to him, is "noteworthy for the extraordinary advance made in the presentation of plays on the stage." In other words, the seventeenth is great drama, the eighteenth great acting, and the nineteenth great stage-mounting.

The seventeenth, says Mr Irving, "is in theatrical history the century of the actor; he and not the dramatist is the dominating figure, his the achievement that survives, his that finds in this century its highest opportunity for distinction.... For the plays that attracted audiences in the eighteenth century are for the most part dead things." Later on: "There was another and a very strong reason why the actor of the eighteenth century was encouraged--nay, driven--to exert his powers to the utmost. It lay in the conditions under which he was compelled to exercise his art."

These conditions were unsuitability of costume, the conduct of an unruly audience, and the meanness of the mounting. The eighteenth-century players pursued "the pure art of acting, una.s.sisted by the collaboration of other arts," and in them their art received its highest expression.

From this it appears that if you wish for great acting you must have poor plays cheaply mounted. Probably Mr Irving would shun such a conclusion. He would say that the great acting was the result of the conditions, but not an inevitable result, and that whilst modesty of mounting may be a necessary condition, worthlessness of drama is not.

Yet we see a distinction and a truth emerging. The actors of the golden age--of acting--had to make silk purses out of sows' ears, and they made them. Their age was less golden when they had great drama to play.

The triumph of a play, so far as the co-operation of author and actor is concerned, may be regarded as one hundred, and the greater the share in it of the one the less that of the other. Since the actor's proportion is higher as the dramatist's is lower, it follows that his work is more brilliant in mediocre plays than in masterpieces. This, however, cannot be accepted without taking into account the fact that many plays have been written very skilfully as mere vehicles for the actor.

It is sometimes a nice question which is the horse and which the cart.

How often in the heyday of her fame did we see Bernhardt in any save "built-up" dramas--plays "written round" her and intended to give her an opportunity of showing off her amazing physical gifts? Need it be added that the "star" actresses of other nations were all eager to appear in these pieces? Is, then, the actor's art at its greatest when the player is thrilling the house in a mediocre drama, or when he and the true dramatist are producing a great effect together?

Mr Irving will probably reply that the actors of the golden age had great triumphs in Shakespeare. Now, it may be observed that in most of his tragedies, though not guilty of writing "star" parts, Shakespeare, himself an actor, took very great pains to create "fat" acting parts, and the actor-managers of the eighteenth century were careful that, in the mutilated versions which they presented, these parts did not shrink in relative importance. The great dramatist's action in this respect is not, as a general rule, followed by the serious playwrights of the present.

Whilst speaking of Shakespeare, one may refer to a pa.s.sage in the essays which has some bearing on the question of the place of acting in the hierarchy of the arts. Garrick clearly was the greatest actor of his century; but in speaking of Barry, Mr Irving says: "He had not Garrick's fire or versatility; he had no gift for comedy; but in such parts as Oth.e.l.lo, Romeo and Alexander the Great his superior physique, his stately grace, his charming pathos gave him the victory." _His superior physique_ is a phrase which explains the reluctance of some fully to admit the actor's claim for his art: they think that the purely physical enters too often into the matter. There may even be detractors moved by jealousy, unknown, perhaps, to themselves, of the "superior physique."

Possibly there are more subtle reasons why many writers are unwilling to recognize the highest claims of the actor. They are perhaps, discernible in what Mr Irving calls "the sympathetic reflections of Charles Lamb"

and the "impressive nonsense that Doctor Johnson talked" about acting.

In one of the essays we find: "There has been at all times a certain resentment on the part of some writers against the player, against his immediate fame.... It is a form of jealousy that has warped many otherwise enlightened minds: an envy that forgets that a capacity to act is a much rarer gift than a capacity to write." What is the meaning of the last sentence. Does it mean that Garricks are rarer than Tuppers?--a sad thought: or that Siddonses are rarer than Shakespeares?--which may be denied confidently.

Does it mean anything? Perhaps not. It merely exhibits a confusion between the relative and the absolute. This warping jealousy--if it exist--really is due to a feeling that the actor becomes great in popularity at the expense of the author. When the actor causes the triumph of the play the author should be grateful; when the play causes the triumph of the actor the playwright may feel a little jealous, and writers may sympathize with him. There are plays and plays, just as there is acting and acting. In subtle modern pieces conscientious actors of fair ability rarely fail, and success (within certain limits) is common in _Hamlet_.