Our Stage and Its Critics Part 10

Some time ago a musical comedy was produced the notices upon which were a little amazing. Several were impolite about the book, others unfriendly to the music; but almost all agreed that the scenery and costumes were of remarkable beauty. Now, in the first act an excellent opportunity for picturesque mounting had been wasted, and the setting of the second act was deplorable. It was a great blaze of gold and yellow, which endured for about an hour and a half, with, of course, some little relief here and there, and it fatigued some eyes and caused some headaches. No doubt we were in the minority.

It may be that most people are not sensitive to colour; any of our senses may be irresponsive. A friend of mine puts a lot of cayenne pepper and mustard and Worcester sauce on toasted cheese; obviously he has a dull palate. There are people to whom nothing in the way of music appeals except violent tunes. We know that colour-blindness in different degrees is the common lot; very possibly what to the sensitive seems a picture rich in tender colour, to the ma.s.s appears dull drab; and the scene whose shrieking gorgeousness oppresses the eye and brain of the artist is subtle to the Philistine--it is difficult to know. Who can imagine a picture gallery as seen by the person who suffers even mildly from colour-blindness? There are those who have a dull sense of smell, and the case has happened of a girl only stopped by accident from going to a ball decked in flowers that looked pretty and smelt abominably.

This raises rather a large question about stage-mounting; if the majority are not sensitive, then business instinct demands that the colour-scheme should be crude. Some time ago much admiration was expressed in the press at the beauty of a ballet designed by Mr Wilhelm, a real colourist, who is able not only to produce lovely delicate effects but to present pictures of vivid gorgeous colour so strong and subtle as to delight the artist and the Philistine. The same phrases that had been bestowed upon the Empire ballet were lavished by the same writers upon an entertainment at another house at which, in fact, there was a horrible debauch of crude, yelping, clas.h.i.+ng colours.

The matter is difficult for the managers, or at least for those of them who have a sense of colour. In one way their position is easy enough; if they spend a lot of money on the dress and scenery, the press, with rare exceptions, will gush about the beauty of the setting, however vicious it may be. The Englishman who uses violent bottled sauces to destroy the delicate flavour of a sole or to add taste to toasted cheese rules the roast. People often proclaim that they like "colour"--by "colour" they mean bright, showy colours. Their taste is that of the negro; give him plenty of gaudy red and yellow and he is happy.

In modern comedies the difficulty might be avoided, since as a rule modern people in society do not employ violent colours, and the modern interiors in most instances exhibit agreeably the influence of the so-called aesthetic craze. Yet we have plenty of horrors. Ellen Terry in her interesting biography says that she never settled on her dresses without seeing whether they would harmonize with the scenery. This wisdom, alas! is rarely shown, and we very often see a charming interior ruined by gowns hostile to it in colour.

The question of form in the costumes is somewhat different; yet one cannot pa.s.s from it without expressing regret that the stage is so weak-minded as to permit itself to be the subject of the maddest experiments of milliners, and to accept tamely their _rossignols_. A few of our actresses know how to dress and to wear their gowns; n.o.body except the milliners seems to look after the others, and they form the majority. In many instances, no doubt, the ladies in the cast ought not to be blamed: they have a very restricted choice, if any. Lately there was a case where a handsome sum of money was put up by a syndicate for the ladies' costumes in a play, and nine-tenths of it was appropriated by the powerful leading lady, leaving for the others a ridiculous amount.

It is in romantic comedy we suffer most. To begin with, one may a.s.sert the general proposition that the sense of pictorial art on the stage is entirely conventional and academic; of course there are exceptional cases--rare, alas! The ideal seems to be to reach chromo-lithographic effects and the beauties of the old-fas.h.i.+oned valentine; for the suggestive, the mysterious, the imaginative little affection is shown.

The real tub has developed into the real tree with real blossoms and real leaves wired on, not a thing regarded as a matter of form and colour, but as a realistic imitation of a natural object. Broad effects are frittered away by ma.s.ses of irritating detail, the production of which costs a a great deal of money.

Scenes and costumes are designed without due consideration of the fact that they are to be before our eyes for a long time. Occasionally we are pleased by a striking picture for five minutes, during which the play is forgotten; then the play a.s.serts itself and the money spent on the mounting ceases to bear fruit, and a little later on the vivid spectacular effect, charming for five minutes, becomes trying by reason of its quality, and it rea.s.serts itself aggressively, to the hurt of the play. We have gorgeous costumes which, when first presented and grouped, produce beautiful effects; afterwards costumes inharmonious with them are introduced, the grouping is altered, and the colour-scheme destroyed; then the question comes into mind, How is it that all these characters have brand-new costumes, although the circ.u.mstances of the drama show that most of the dresses would be torn or dirty or faded? It may be an answer that this convention is so firmly established as not to be absurd; but the convention is constantly violated where it would be too blatantly ridiculous by somebody presenting himself with torn or dirtied or faded costume. How much more beautiful as a rule the costumes become after the play has run a while!

From the colour point of view, it was the blessing of the romantic period that the ruck and run of people had to wear their velvets and silks and satins till time and wear and tear had toned down and harmonized the colours. It must be remembered, too, that in the evening they were seen under favourable circ.u.mstances, for the lights and shades must have been strong, although the lighting was feeble before the use of gas was discovered and before the oil-wells were found that have made half the population of the United States slaves to a few plutocrats.

Also, "shoddy" had not been invented, nor had coal-tar dyes been discovered by the English and exploited by the Germans now groaning over the wise tyranny of the provisions of the new Patent Act, to which ignorant people have applied the offensive term "Protectionist." Shoddy treated with aniline dyes can produce effects that overwhelm the colours of the honest old materials which owed their hues to the efforts of the vegetable and the insect. A modern manufacturer is proud when his scarlet shoddy shrieks like a steam siren. Unfortunately some of the managers seem to like the shriek.

Stage Meals

An undistinguished foreigner from France was talking the other day about the English stage, of which apparently he had seen a good deal. After being asked many searching questions put in the hopes of eliciting material for "copy" it was discovered that what he most admired in our theatre is the way in which stage meals are treated. In the first place, he was astonished at the "exquisite distinction" displayed by the players in eating them. The "perfect elegance" which one actress exhibited in consuming an egg had fascinated him and he stated with conviction that he could have spent a happy evening simply watching her eat these ill-starred hopes of chickens. It was pointed out that the management could hardly afford to pay her a sufficient salary for the strain on her digestive faculties, and also that the eggs--real Boat Race eggs, not election missiles--cost something.

He is quite an undistinguished person and utterly _bourgeois_, though he has written some successful funny farces which as yet have not suffered the dishonour of adaptation, and during his many visits to London has acquired an even more perfect ignorance of the English and their ways than if he had never paid tribute to Neptune; for he always stays at a little French hotel where there is absolutely nothing British, not even the meat or the matches or the was.h.i.+ng arrangements.

Now, if there is one matter of manners in which we are better than the people of the Continent it is in our mode of eating. How this has come about it is difficult to say. One knows that good French families sometimes engage English nursery governesses in order that the children may be brought up to feed themselves daintily, and that people in good society on the other side of the streak certainly commit acts at dinner which are rather ugly. Goodness knows what is the reason. Possibly the cynic would discover in our greater refinement a curious form of sn.o.bbishness, the sort of timidity about accomplis.h.i.+ng before other people a natural function which in other aspects of life is certainly carried too far by us.

We have an extraordinary amount of eating nowadays upon the stage, managed very badly. In the old days, when people got through a banquet, consisting chiefly of a special brand of cardboard chicken, a real _diner a la carte_ at the present time only used in pantomime, washed down by copious draughts of nothing from gilded _papier-mache_ goblets which refuse to make the c.h.i.n.k of metal, and spent no more than five minutes over the whole affair, it was recognized that the banquet was a mere convention; n.o.body pretended to believe in any aspect of it, and therefore no one questioned its verisimilitude.

In the twentieth century real food is consumed, the diet being chiefly vegetarian, and damp decoctions are drunk with gusto. Occasionally, it is said, Persian sherbet, or lemon kali, once joys of our youth, give a theatrical fizziness to toast and water in bottles with deceitful lordly labels. Unfortunately, except in _The Man from Blankley's_, these real things are consumed as fast as a midday meal at an American boarding-house, with the result that they are a mixture of realism and convention profoundly unconvincing. Art would be better served by the old-fas.h.i.+oned method, for the playgoer is more willing to concede a whole than a half "make-belief."

One amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the French is that not only are the names abominably misp.r.o.nounced--which can hardly be avoided--but that the efforts at representing the foreign feeding as a rule are all wrong. Simili-champagne is consumed where no Frenchman would dream of drinking "fizz," for across the Channel the detestable sn.o.bbishness of the English in relation to champagne is imitated chiefly by the modern plutocracy and by the prosperous members of what is alleged to be the most ancient, if hardly the most honourable, of professions. When we see a French company in a play, the leading lady solemnly wipes the inside of her gla.s.s with her napkin, occasionally goes a little further and breathes into it--breathes rather dampishly. In the subsequent English version the leading actress is far too much of a lady to do anything of the kind. The foreigners cut up everything on their plates, clean their knives upon the bread, sometimes before and sometimes afterwards scooping out the salt with them, and then lay them by for the next dish. Of course the English company is not guilty of such solecisms.

The original troupe stuffs a napkin, half-way in size between a bath-towel and a tablecloth, inside its neck-band so as to protect its clothes against the little _taches_ concerning which, as a rule, it is more anxious in relation to its costume than its character--in the play; but our better-bred players ignore this, and merely spread their "serviettes" upon their unimperilled knees. Has anyone ever seen a British player, even when he called himself "Ongri" or "Gontrang," wipe his plate with a piece of bread and swallow the latter rapturously?

It may be contended that the English players are wise, perhaps without knowing it. Unadulterated truth sometimes comes off second best in the theatre, as is proved by the ancient story of the actor who was hissed because instead of imitating the squeaks of a pig he pinched the tail of a real porker in a poke; upon the stage a little truth is sometimes dangerous, a great deal often fatal. As a last word, in these as in all other germane matters our British productions are vastly more accurate than those that come from the other side of the Atlantic. It may be the fact that the good Americans, when they die, go to Paris; they do not take the trouble to learn anything beforehand concerning the French.

This, however, is not remarkable; there are very few really French people in Paris.

CHAPTER VII

THE MORALITY OF OUR DRAMA

Mr Harry Lauder on the Morals of our Drama

A little while ago Mr Harry Lauder made some statements to a representative of _The Daily Chronicle_ concerning the relations between music-halls and theatres. Some readers may be aware that Mr Harry Lauder is a popular music-hall singer, and by many people regarded as the chief of his calling. Consequently his utterances have a little importance.

According to Mr Lauder a gulf exists between the theatres and the music-halls, and it is due to the fact that the playhouses traffic in immorality and the halls are pure. The variety theatres shudder at the thought of presenting plays that introduce people who are or have been unduly intimate without marriage. Let us use the words of the stern moralist: "Now, take certain plays produced in certain theatres. The curtain rises, and you ask yourself the question, 'Will they marry?'"

The att.i.tude reminds one a little of the dear ladies at the seaside who use prism field-gla.s.ses in order to be sure whether the costumes of the bathers are really indecent. "Sometimes you think, 'Are they married?'

In that play there is throughout a suggestiveness which would not be allowed in a music-hall."

Ye G.o.ds and little Lauder, how beautiful and simple is the morality of the music-hall! "Be married and you will be virtuous" seems to sum it up. From the Lauder point of view there are no difficult questions of morality; there are sheep and there are goats, but no hybrids, and we ought never to refer to the goats in public. There are no problem plays, for there are no problems; everything is plain and easy. Intimate relations between people not married to one another are beyond discussion, and it is vulgar to present such law-breakers upon the stage.

The great Lauder attacks Mr Barrie; he complains of _What Every Woman Knows_. It has one fault, for "there is a touch of immorality in it which does not exist, as he must know, in the true character of a Scotsman. The man going away with another woman is the only part of the play which I did not like; and it was quite unnecessary. Jimmy Barrie is a far cleverer man than he thinks he is, but I am sorry for this piece."

Poor Mr Barrie, the great Lauder is sorry for you. Still, it must be some comfort for you to know that the great ill.u.s.trious immortal Lauder calls you "Jimmy."

Let us dig a little deeper into the gold-mine. It is very touching to see the confidence of Mr Lauder in the virtue of his fellow-countrymen.

According to him, "no touch of immorality exists in the true character of a Scotsman." Yet it is said that the streets of bonnie Glasgow and other great towns of virtuous Scotland are not free from the presence of the hapless followers of Rahab, but perhaps they are only there for the entertainment of English visitors.

According to the last edition of _Chambers's Encyclopaedia_, the proportion of illegitimate births in Scotland to legitimate is nearly twice the proportion in England, and almost three times as great as that in Ireland. No doubt this, again, is due to the foul Saxon. It is wonderful that the Scots do not prevent us from coming into their virtuous country. Yet an idea comes to mind--uncharitable, no doubt.

Some people have thought it an ugly touch in Mr Barrie's play when one of Maggie's brothers hissed the term of reproach "Englishman" to John Shand on discovering his faithlessness to his wife. It seemed a brutal charge of Pharisaism to the minds of us benighted Southerners. Was the author making an antic.i.p.atory hit at Mr Lauder?

Somewhat later in the interview are these words: "Now, when you go to the theatre you get the good and the bad characters, and I contend that there is no necessity to show the bad." Alas! poor Shakespeare, Lauder obliterates you with a sentence, and under his severe censure your warmest admirers should try to save your reputation by accepting the view that Bacon wrote the plays--and the poems as well. It would be thrilling to have a drama in which all the characters were good, but how would the dramatists construct their plots without the use of a villain?

However, to be just to Mr Lauder, by badness of character he means lack of reverence for chast.i.ty. It is a curious point of view that involves the banishment from the stage of all questions concerning right and wrong in the traffic between man and woman, which condemns _What Every Woman Knows_ as immoral. People used to think that the music-hall stage might be a kind of feeding-ground for drama, might breed playgoers capable of taking the view that drama has other functions than merely that of amusing; but, if the ill.u.s.trious Lauder is correct, the music-halls stand aloof. Even the ladies of the promenade would be shocked by _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, fly blus.h.i.+ngly from _The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, and put ashes on their dyed hair if _Iris_ were offered to them. What a topsy-turvydom the entertainment world seems when a popular star ventures to censure in a great daily paper the modern drama of the country and takes himself quite seriously in urging the superiority of the music-halls in taste and morality to the theatres!

Mr Lauder, in addition to his curious ideas about drama from a moral point of view, seems to have strange opinions concerning the nature of plays. He says: "Moreover, in a theatre only one or two stars appear, and they appear only now and again; otherwise they would not s.h.i.+ne! If they were always on the stage there would be a sameness in the performance. And the other members of the company are only playing up to these stars, giving so much padding to the entertainment. Little wonder that the public is not satisfied with the play of to-day." If we understand this correctly, and we have honestly tried to do so, it involves a complete misunderstanding as to the nature of drama, and means that Mr Lauder thinks that its whole purpose is to provide star acting parts, and that, since plays cannot be written in which all the characters are star parts, drama is a poor sort of stuff of no great interest. In his calling, of course, all are stars, though, perhaps, he would hardly admit that all are of equal brilliance; and one fancies that he regards as inacceptable any entertainment during which part of the stage is occupied by persons receiving no greater salary than that of a county court judge.

Of course, every man is ent.i.tled to his own point of view, and if Mr Lauder considers that his turns are preferable to drama, he is quite right to say so. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of persons to whom his performances represent the summit of art; they, of course, are ent.i.tled to their opinions.

There is no reason for supposing that his remarks are not uttered in good faith. Indeed, it is their obviously complacent sincerity which renders them so exquisitely comic. If he were half as funny on the stage as he is in cold print, the whole world would be at his feet. From one point of view his utterances are quite unimportant: to the world outside the music-hall they only represent the unintentional humours of a man without weight, save in his branch of his calling; but, so far as they are the opinions of the variety stage, the matter is serious, since it suggests that the modern drama has an enemy, not a friend, in the music-halls, and an enemy which works under such unfair conditions of advantage and is so powerfully organised that it may become the duty of the theatre to wage a fierce war upon it.

No great change would be needed in the conduct of the playhouses in London to enable them to cut into the music-halls. The sympathy with the music-halls of those who have been advocating free trade in drama may become exhausted, and, on the other hand, a system may be devised under which the theatres take music-hall licences, and then the inflated salaries which have led to swollen heads will soon shrink.

Double Entente

The correspondence provoked concerning Mr Harry Lauder and his views about the drama and the music-halls was a little disappointing owing to its onesidedness. The music-hall performer in one respect resembled St Athanasius. A pa.s.sage in a letter on the topic was surprising. Miss Violet Vanbrugh said: "The English language, too, is so difficult; it leaves so little to the imagination. It seems to come down definitely, in a fearfully flat-footed fas.h.i.+on. The French dramatist finds his task made easy, as his language can suggest simply without definitely stating, more easily than can be done in English."

This opinion is surprising. It would be amazing if it were correct, seeing the enormous wealth of our language in words and forms of expression, and the fact that for the best part of a century our dramatists lived chiefly on "hints," upon suggesting more than they durst say. The very word "hint" is significant. We use it frequently; who can find a word in the French language that exactly represents it?

One may add that we have English equivalents for most, perhaps all, of the French phrases that have to serve for our handy word "hint." When one recollects the hundreds of adaptations of more or less indelicate or indecent French plays seen on our boards, the idea that it is difficult for the English expert to say nasty things nicely seems absurd. Our journalists have used more often the incorrect phrase _double entendre_ than the French critics the phrase _double entente_, which is the term that our writers intend to employ.

Were it otherwise, one would be amazed. The French always have been, and still are, very candid in the use of language; whilst we for a long time past have been prudish to an extent sometimes comic. Readers of Laurence Sterne can hardly deny that the English tongue enables one to be indelicate in idea whilst decent in expression, and it is noteworthy that this writer, so often censured for the immodest salt of his wit, is one of those who comment with surprise upon the simple frankness of the French of his time. There is an episode in "Tristram Shandy," or "The Sentimental Journey" concerning a lady, the author and a carriage drive, which shows this very well; but the printers would strike if asked to set it up in these chaste pages.

Our own native prudery, enriched by a quant.i.ty imported from the United States, has led to an immense hypocrisy of language, and consequently to an extraordinary facility in hinting unseemly ideas which on the French stage would be expressed bluntly. It is true that, so far as love is concerned, the French have invented a funny little language of prudery for the benefit of schoolgirls, and countless books have been printed, and received the benediction of Monseigneur l'Archeveque de Tours, in which the word _tambour_ is printed instead of the word _amour_, and so on. By-the-by, it is rather quaint that the Archbishop of Tours should be chosen as G.o.dfather of these superchaste books, seeing that Touraine has a rather famous reputation for naughty stories, and Balzac alleges that his naughty "Contes Drolatiques" are "Colliges ez Abbayes de Touraine." It would be remarkable if the French tongue lent itself as easily as ours to the _double entente_.

We have a far larger vocabulary available and in common use, and we possess slang not only of the different nations const.i.tuting the United Kingdom, but also slang from the United States, and from our Colonies, whilst we have a lawlessness in the use of our language not permitted to the French. There are disadvantages as well as advantages from this, for as a result our tongue is abominably rich in ambiguities, and it is a common observation that French scientific works are clearer than ours, not only because the nation is more logical, but also on account of the fact that the language is more precise. Some people, no doubt, fancy that the French dramatists are conveying indelicate ideas delicately, because they do not exactly understand what is being said or sung.

Remarks have been made about the subtlety of French after speeches and songs which, if literally translated, would have cleared the house. "_Ne rien comprendre c'est tout gober_" is a convenient twist of language.

Did not Yvette Guilbert sing publicly in London the song with the refrain "_Hors du mariage_" ... we must stop there.

Our stage has suffered because our dramatists have been able to get much of the indelicate fun out of French farces by using, hypocritically, decent phrases which all parties understand in a bad sense whilst pretending to see nothing shocking in them; for without this elasticity of our tongue British playwrights would have been thrown upon their own resources. Nowadays our playwrights have to some extent abandoned their subservience to France, and it is noticeable that those who take their work seriously, and deal with the difficult questions of life sincerely, are showing a tendency to abandon the language of suggestion, to give up hinting, and to avoid the _double entente_. The result is that many prudes are shocked, and people who have no real objection to certain subjects or ideas denounce plays embodying them because this hypocrisy of language has been abandoned.

The Censor, of course, is one obstacle to plain speaking. He and his office are the superb representatives of English cant, hypocrisy and prudery, and one advantage that must follow from the abolition, if it comes, will be the ousting of the comedy of indecent suggestion by the drama of honest candour. He possesses his little vocabulary in which _tambour_ pa.s.ses for _amour_, and in fact his office has been worked on the ostrich head-in-the-sand system for many years past. The chief duty of the official has been to prevent people from calling a spade a spade, and most, though not all, of the pieces banned would have obtained a licence if in place of straightforward phrase the author had employed some hypocritical, prudish suggestion.