Our Stage and Its Critics Part 5

Mr Klaw's article is amusing in its unconscious humour. In one part he denies the existence of certain facts, whilst in another he attempts to show that their existence is beneficial to everybody. The important feature of it is a candid admission that the aims of the syndicate are entirely commercial and that he, one of its princ.i.p.al members, looks upon the theatre from no other point of view than that of business.

"The theatre," he says, "is governed by the rules and observances of all other commercial enterprises. It is not out to dictate to public taste.

It is out to satisfy the public demand. While even such a purely business undertaking must be hedged about with essential suggestions of artistic refinement, I do not believe that the public demands of us that we should give over our commercialism. Moreover, the public would have no such right."

There is no need to criticise Mr Klaw's style: still it is rather amusing to think that he sometimes discusses the literary quality of his wares.

If there be any chance of our theatres becoming subject to a syndicate which replies officially to its critics in such a fashion there is serious danger to be considered. Now, according to certain statements by Mr Belasco and by writers in and to _The Referee_, the Theatrical Syndicate does, in fact, control to a very great extent the drama in America, and there is no real doubt about the accuracy of the proposition that the drama in the States is in a worse plight than the drama in London. If, judging by the ordinary picked American productions over here, the evidence were otherwise insufficient, the tone of Mr Klaw's article would render it satisfying.

According to Mr Klaw, the Syndicate has conferred certain advantages upon all persons connected with the theatre--except the critics and the public. He does not venture to put his case any higher than that of a trade combination, and it is clear that he at least does not consider the theatre from the point of view of dramatic art. It is difficult to accept this with equanimity. A phrase of his--"the theatre itself is a business house, exhibiting the pictures of the dramatist and composer under the proper light and most attractive auspices, just as the picture-dealer has a picture-house in which he displays the best efforts of the painters and ill.u.s.trators"--is based on a curious fallacy.

The picture-dealer will not hurt his business if, in addition to stocking the Royal Academy works, upon which he relies for his bread-and-b.u.t.ter, in the front window, he devotes a little s.p.a.ce at the back to the unconventional efforts of the true artists. To do this costs him nothing, and he may even make money by such a policy.

The manager of the strictly commercial theatre cannot follow the picture-dealer's example; he must risk serious loss every time that he produces a non-commercial piece. In one respect Mr Klaw is in agreement with some of the English antagonists of the trust system; like them, he is almost indignant at the idea that the theatre should attempt to educate or dictate to the public. As a corollary, he and they must be opposed to the idea that the dramatist or player should have an educational value. Do they think that the public needs no education in theatrical art? Are they content that the great half-washed should remain in their present condition, which exhibits painfully a great lack of education? Presumably.

Mr Klaw deals with the dramatic critic. Here, of course, our withers are wrung and we write with a bias. He is indignant because the Syndicate is accused of an attempt to "stifle and muzzle" dramatic criticism. He thinks that it is "to his best interests to have it [dramatic criticism]

absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and always on the most dignified plane." Then he explains that it is because certain American dramatic critics have fallen from this high standard, or never reached it, that they have been driven from the Syndicate's paradises. Who is to decide whether the critic in a particular case is "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and on the most dignified plane"? Mr Klaw and his colleagues, of course.

There is a certain fable in which a wolf set itself up to judge the conduct of the relatives of an appetising lamb, and executed a vicarious injustice. From time to time London dramatic critics of the highest standard and most respected character have been excluded by particular managers for a while from their houses, because the managers thought they had not been "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and on the most dignified plane." Time and their friends have convinced the managers that they had blundered, and peace was made.

Suppose, however, that those individual managers, who really are people taking a far more dignified view of their calling than that of putting it on the level of the dry-goods store, had been part of a syndicate of Klaws, would those critics have been readmitted? Would the fact have been recognized that the unfavourable notices were really honest dignified criticisms, even if disputable upon the point of justice? Of course not. If the newspapers had combined against the theatres, the Syndicate managers would have climbed down. Would they have combined? I think not. Here, indeed, is the peril.

It appears that the Syndicate has already laid its claws on some of the London theatres. What combination is likely to be formed to fight it; and if there be none, what is the inevitable result? In this land, many centuries ago, even before the famous statute of James I. that regulates our Patent Law, the British feeling has been hostile to monopolies.

Apparently this spirit was thrown overboard during the famous pa.s.sage of _The Mayflower_, or when Boston Bay was turned into a teapot, and certainly the American takes everything on trust, except, indeed, the honesty of his rulers and judges. Unfortunately one of the things we are importing from America--would that there were a real prohibitive tariff against it!--is the monopolistic spirit; and this being the case, it is very rash to hope that we shall band ourselves adequately to resist the attacks of the theatre syndicates.

It is easy to see how such a thing would be worked: at the beginning quietly, pleasantly, until the hold became so strong that the gloves could be taken off and players might be warned not to accept engagements from outsiders on pain of getting none from the trust; and dramatists informed that unless they kept all their wares for the Syndicate they must look to the few outsiders for a living. The American managers, in their big way, would buy up some of the irreconcilable newspapers, would acquire a preponderating influence in the neutral, and discover that the critics representing the independent journals were not "absolutely impartial, absolutely just, and always on the most dignified plane."

Truly, if we are to be judged by such a method, few, if any, of us will escape a whipping. Does the Syndicate regard any critic who expresses an unfavourable opinion about its wares as "absolutely impartial," etc.?

Surely no one who is not "absolutely impartial," etc., is ent.i.tled to apply such a standard to the critics: would this consideration prevent Mr Klaw from judging them and carrying out his sentences? It is to be feared that he would do Jedburgh justice on some of us, and the out-of-work critics would join the crowd at Poverty Corner.

CHAPTER IV

PLAYS OF PARTICULAR TYPES

The Pseudo-Historical

A play running at the Savoy in March 1905, concerning Madame du Barri, called forth the usual complaints about inaccuracy in detail and undesirability of subject. The latter point is not our theme, and may be dismissed with the remark that there was nothing in the life of the creature as presented upon the stage to serve as an excuse for requiring us to spend an evening with such a worthless baggage.

At an early stage of his career the critic welcomes this cla.s.s of pseudo-historical drama--but his welcome takes an unamiable form. He likes to have it produced on a Sat.u.r.day evening, so that he may pa.s.s a happy Sunday. The inaccuracies fascinate him. They offer such a splendid chance of showing the knowledge possessed by him--and his library. When very young he deals with the matter in a straightforward fashion, and trounces the author for every unwitting solecism and willing falsification that is discovered.

He writes a learned little disquisition headed by a remark, in the Macaulay vein, as to matters of common knowledge, and shows from direct authority that the dramatist is quite wrong in mixing up the Du Barri who married the heroine with the Du Barri who took her away from the milliner's shop, and gives a facetious touch of lightness to his remarks by pointing out that neither of the scoundrels was connected with a certain much-advertised proprietary food.

The more obscure the blunder the greater the writer's joy in it, for he will be able to introduce observations beginning "That little known but elegant author," etc., and if the subject is earlier than the Du Barri period he will present some quotations in the uneconomically spelt old French.

A little later in his career his method changes: he relies upon his _batterie de cuisine_ as much as ever, but uses some art to conceal the employment of his apparatus. There will be mere hints about the errors; an adjective between two commas will sometimes represent a severe correction. The books are not referred to, the corrections are made in a fashion which suggests that no greater authority is needed than that of the critic.

A time arrives when he comes to the conclusion that it is no part of his duties to deal with the historical aspect of the matter; but, of course, the habit is upon him, and he excuses himself by saying, after he has pointed out all the errors which he has noticed, that they would not matter in the least if the play were meritorious in other respects.

It is difficult to defend his att.i.tude, which, however, is due to his appreciation of the fact that nowadays a little knowledge is a well-paid thing. Moreover, he does not wish it to be thought that his knowledge of history--and books--is less than that of his rivals. Of course the inaccuracies do not matter very much unless they are so gross as to shock the great half-literate.

There is, however, a more valid objection to the historical play than that it is certain to be inaccurate; the historical drama is rarely a good drama.

The author is compelled by his matter to present it in a conventional fashion, for to give a Du Barri or a Napoleon, a Nelson or a Wellington, not in accordance with the popular concept of such personages would be to seek failure. Moreover, the writer is necessarily forced to belittle the subject if not bold enough to take a simple episode in the life of his hero or heroine, and even then, unless the miracle-working power of genius is employed, the great figure comes out as a small puppet.

The player may be made to look up like Napoleon, may follow traditions as to his gestures and mode of speech, but in none of the vast number of plays concerning the wonderful monster has he ever appeared to be a person of genius: whether handled facetiously, as in Mr Shaw's ingenious play _The Man of Destiny_, or _Madame Sans-Gene_, pathetically as in the play presented by Mr Martin Harvey, or formidably as in most works, he never seems at all different from any commonplace man put into the like circ.u.mstances. Exactly that in which he differed from all others is exactly what cannot be put upon the stage. We have had Nelson, and of course it was quite impa.s.sible to get any suggestion of the qualities that made him Nelson.

The modern tendency in the matter seems to be to choose the reprehensible--such, for instance, as Mlle. Mars, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barri, and La Montansier, women in the career of whom no doubt there were many dramas, similar, however, to the dramas in the lives of other women of their cla.s.s less famous and infamous. When, however, they are put upon the stage they cease to be remarkable, and the characters introduced to support them have the same fate; for instance, the Louis XV. at the Savoy does not give the faintest idea of the ineffably vile monarch, whilst no glimpse is shown of the quality which enabled a Du Barri to obtain her tremendous power.

It is always a case of mountain and mouse in these plays; take as an example the Sardou _Dante_ play produced with prodigious drum-beating a while ago at Drury Lane. Who, if names had been altered, would have guessed that the hero of the piece was the author of the immortal poems?

There has been hardly a historical play in modern times in which the ident.i.ty of the famous personages could be guessed except from the names, the make-up, the costumes, and the specific facts; at the best the pieces are _tableaux vivants_.

Perhaps there is nothing illegitimate in the ambition of the player to pose as one of the mighty dead, and it is rather humility in the author which urges him to seek advent.i.tious interest than vanity that causes him to believe himself really able to give a true idea of a Napoleon.

Into such delicate questions it is needless to inquire. The point is that the lives of the great are not more dramatic than the lives of the small. Napoleon at St Helena was not more unhappy than were millions of people of his day. There is a drama as poignant in the history of Cesar Birotteau as in that of Marie Antoinette, as big a tragedy in the career of Whitaker Wright as in that of Napoleon III.

There was a reason, which exists no longer, why the authors of the Middle Ages chose characters of great social status for their princ.i.p.al parts, and even this reason was not altogether well founded. It would be wrong to a.s.sert that historical plays ought not to be written, for, whilst not recommending the use of the stage instead of history cla.s.ses, one can see that a historical play may ill.u.s.trate ideas that could hardly be presented otherwise.

There is a noteworthy instance in the work of the much-abused Ibsen.

_The Pretenders_ is a historical drama amazingly rich in idea; whether the idea of kingship superbly handled in it is an anachronism it is hard to say, or to tell whether the dramatist chose his subject to ill.u.s.trate his idea or the idea to embellish his subject; but in it, though obviously there is scope for magnificent mounting and interesting detail, one feels that the genius of the author has prevented him from making any sacrifice of the dramatic aspect. He has not chosen a popular historical personage and made him into the hero of the melodrama, as happens in the case of nine out of ten of the so-called historical plays, but has written a drama that demands a royal atmosphere, which he handles admirably.

What a pity that the money lavished upon the Du Barri play--and lavished very cleverly, it must be admitted, so far as the production of beautiful stage-pictures is concerned--was not spent in the mounting of a great drama like _The Pretenders_, rich in strong acting parts, magnificent in presentation of character, and really illuminated by ideas!

The Horrible in Drama

It has been alleged that _The Monkey's Paw_, a clever one-act play by Messrs Jacobs and Barker, formerly presented at the Haymarket Theatre, is too horrible for the stage. The part complained of is confined to the last scene of three.

A young man has been killed in a factory, and his body was so mangled by the fatal wheels that even his father was not allowed to see it. Late at night the father, by means of a diabolical talisman--the Monkey's Paw--succeeds in recalling his son to life, and the audience hears a knocking at the door. What is knocking? The mother is making frantic efforts to pull back the bolts. Her son is there, returned from the grave. The father, aware that the talisman, which promised the fulfilment of three wishes, is of a fiendish malignity, guesses that if the door be opened his son will stand before them alive, but fearfully mangled and mutilated, so he is groping upon the floor for the Monkey's Paw, and the audience feels that on the other side of the door is an obscene horror fresh from the grave. There was a sigh of relief in the theatre when the father found the talisman, and, using the last wish, prayed successfully that his son might be dead and at peace.

The knock, knock, was decidedly impressive, like the knocking at the door in _Macbeth_, which greatly affected Charles Lamb. Is this matter too horrible for the stage? One may compare it with another horror given not long ago, _The Soothing System_, which Mr Bourchier adapted cleverly from a story by Edgar Poe and produced at the Garrick, showing the terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of which had overpowered their keepers. This was very powerful and horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous tale in the collection of goblin stories by the Brothers Grimm.

Nevertheless it was not legitimate, partly because the circ.u.mstances are rare when it is permissible to present madness on the stage, partly because some of the mad people were repulsive to the eye, and partly because horror was the sole means and end of the piece. Many condemned _The Monkey's Paw_, yet a line can be drawn between it and _The Soothing System_--not a nice sharp line, but one of those blurred lines so faint and so uncertain, that even if their existence be admitted, there is always room for a fight on the question whether a work lies on this or that side of it.

Speaking roughly, one may say that _The Monkey's Paw_ is legitimate because there is nothing in it repulsive to the eye, and for the reason that horror is not the sole means and end of it: the story, like its prototype folk-lore tale, "The Three Wishes," has an obvious moral. It belongs to art because the emotion caused is due to a stimulus to our imagination by the force of an idea and not of a thing exhibited. If an effort were made to show us any ghastly creature knocking, the work would be out of court.

To ill.u.s.trate the line of definition already indicated, a few instances of the horrible presented on the stage in our time may be given usefully; it must be added that most appear to lie on the wrong side.

Shakespeare's adventures in the horrible are legitimate, with an exception in the case of one play of doubtful authenticity, _t.i.tus Andronicus_. On the other hand, _Sweeney Todd; or, The Barber of Fleet Street_, would probably find no defender; whilst a historical drama I once saw in the South of France, where the hero was put upon the rack in front of the footlights and squirmed and screamed, was quite unendurable; and this is rather a pity, since there is a very powerful dramatic scene in Balzac's _Notes sur Catherine de Medicis_, which in consequence of this objection should not be used. There is a mitigated form of the torture business in _La Tosca_ that caused great discussion.

Perhaps those who deem it illegitimate are somewhat supersensitive; it would be more polite, and perhaps accurate, to call them hyper-modern.

_Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_ presented a very difficult case. I can remember nothing so "creepy" and "shuddery" as the first appearance of Mr Mansfield at the Lyceum in the character of the evil doctor; the house gasped at the half-seen image of a sort of obscene beast at the conservatory window, and there was the silence of breathless horror when it bounded into the room and seized its victim. Until the impression wore off the Mansfield Hyde was almost as horrible as the fantastic things born of the cruel imagination and brilliant pencil of Mr S.H.

Sime, whose work is sometimes so richly embellished by imagination as well as by superb technique that one cannot deny its claim to be regarded as art.

Something of the distinction here discussed can be seen by comparing Mr Sime's drawings with the pictures of the mad painter Wirtz, whose abominable gallery at Brussels is a chamber of unimaginative horrors. It may be remembered that Mr Mansfield had a compet.i.tor in Mr Bandman Palmer, who, however, missed horror by the simple vulgarity of his horrors, and, though he may have impressed the simple-minded, was ludicrous to the thoughtful.

Returning for a moment to the clearly unpermissible, one might take a book like "Frankenstein." Certainly any presentation on the stage of the man-monster as described by the talented auth.o.r.ess would fall under the censure of being disgusting. This term may be used concerning several needless exhibitions of blood on the stage, and of such a matter as _Nana_, once presented in Paris. When the hapless heroine appeared in the last act with wax spots to indicate the pustules of smallpox, she very nearly "took a lot out of us," if one may borrow a phrase from "Mr Hopkinson." Obviously anything that reminds one of the ghastly horrors at the Royal College of Surgeons or the Polyclinic Inst.i.tute is quite unforgivable.