it is strange that the theatre should matter in a nation such as ours, which has gained a reputation for liberalism and tolerance, being tolerant because it cared for nothing, and liberal because it understood little. the vogue of the theatre reflects the character of urban england, which is as frivolous as that of urban italy is dour; because it is the symbol of pleasure, easily attained and still more easily digested, it can always find room in the newspaper, where the affairs of the nation flicker and the claims of art are unmet. for let there be no confusion: art and the theatre are not the same thing; almost one might say that if a play possesses artistic quality it holds a passport to eternity, with this difference, that many things lost in eternity are remembered. a little more may be said of this further on.
london has always been a city of theatres, perhaps because we have, for many centuries, laboured under the puritan tradition: its bitterness has attached to the theatre a glamour foreign to it in hotter lands. when you open a book of memoirs by an italian, a german, or a russian, you may be sure that it will consist in portraits of politicians, biographies of cocottes, stories of riots and coronations, but if at hatchards you peer into any volume called my life, or something like that, you will almost invariably discover that the greater part of the author’s life seems to have been employed in meeting sir henry irving, or waiting outside the adelphi on first nights. the theatre, you see, is wicked and winning; the most august of the augustine, messrs coutts and co., stamp upon their cheques their old sign: ‘at the “three crowns” in the strand, next door to the globe theatre, a.d. 1692.’ i will wager those three crowns that no bank manager would ever think of advertising on his cheques: ‘next door to westminster abbey.’ why this should be is not entirely explained by the puritan tradition, and it is still less explained by the london theatres themselves, nearly all of them, the meanest, dirtiest,16 dingiest, fustiest, frowstiest edifices in the country. this is true, whether you pass from drury lane, that cave of winds, to ‘behind,’ at the kingsway, where the oldest rabbit would get lost. indeed, our theatres must have been influenced by the puritan tradition, for everything has been done to hide their addresses in the papers, to make their doors invisible, their seating suitable for a christian martyr. there is not in london a pre-boer war theatre the pit of which is not summed up by rutland barrington’s song: ‘you bark your shins, you bang your head, your knees are up to your nose in bed ...’ and so on. they are so arranged that people delicately place their feet in the small of your back, so that nobody can enter the middle of a row without disturbing it, or leave it without infuriating it; as for the rakes, in spite of the matinée hat, i suspect that they have been planned to encourage expensive transfers. of course, the worst theatres are those which are known as the ‘good old’ ones. there is no such thing as good old. there is nothing but bad old, and the theatre is an example. it must have been that heathen god, good old, invented covent garden. good old got it up in red and gold (good old would); good old planned the slips, which on one side let you hear all the strings and on the other all the brass. good old says it is cheap for half a crown. good old planned drury lane and laid it down where no buses pass. and, no doubt, good old handed over what was then her majesty’s theatre to shakespeare as dramatised by beerbohm tree.
some of the old london theatres, it is true, are a little less repulsive because they are not quite so large. thus, the haymarket, the royalty, and in a queer, insidious way old sadler’s wells. sadler’s wells has gone; there to-day upon the film cowboys race and rescue, and negroid heroines register their emotions, but not long ago it was one of the few pleasant places good old had bequeathed us, with its hemicycle of plush-backed stalls, its little boxes lined with an inch of lush and half an inch of dirt, its heavy red hangings, favourable to lovers, its preposterous plays of love, gold, faith, patriotism, and banana falls. you see, at sadler’s wells, good old dated back to about 1780, while at17 most of our theatres he has brought himself up to date, say to 1860, and has grown respectable; it has not agreed with him. when we consider the few new theatres that have been built, such as the scala, the little theatre, the ambassadors, we are sure that the old cannot be brought up to date. like most old institutions, the english theatre can be reformed only by dynamite.
as in many human things, architecture is at fault. the playhouse is evolved from the roman circus. but the circus offered a performance without scenery, which could be seen from all sides. when scenery came, it grew impossible to show the play except from one side, so as not to give away the mystery; thus we obtained the semi-circular auditorium, which would be quite satisfactory if it did not result in a perpetually partial view for one half of the audience. the old play was mainly pantomimic; when the play grew more articulate it became impossible to hear the words very far, and as the theatre could not spread outwards it spread upwards. then chaos came, for rakes had to be so arranged as to enable people to see, and yet packed close under another tier. the result is sardines.
indeed, when we consider what it labours against, it is remarkable that the theatre should be so healthy. every year, well over half the plays that are put on enjoy less than six weeks’ run, and if it were not notorious that bankruptcy is a profitable trade one would wonder how managers live. the managers seem to have done everything to achieve financial suicide. especially during the last twenty years; notably stimulated by mr charles frohman and mr george edwardes, they have indulged in an endless competition in expensive staging. it grew quite common for a play to cost ￡5000 to stage, and much more was spent sometimes. now, that large sum was risked, not invested, and so the unfortunate manager had to pay his backers a heavy toll. i am sure he was entirely wrong, for audiences prefer plays to scenery, and mr cochran, one of the few managers who remembers that once upon a time he was a public, has proved this by staging a successful revue for about ￡150. do not believe that i am a highbrow; i do not suggest that a little bit of fluff should be staged without18 scenery, but with curtains (though there is a lot in curtains, if discreetly drawn), but i do suggest that the more elaborate the scenery, the more the play is overlooked. perhaps that is what the managers desire, and judging from the condition of modern drama, perhaps they are right. but i attribute to the managers no such profundities of psychology. rather would i say that they know what the public wants, and one thing they know well: the public wants certain actors and wants them passionately.
i shall never forget a certain performance of king henry v. there entered a man in silver armour, his visor down, and a gasping female by my side said: ‘that’s lewis waller.’ and the worst of it is that she was right, and that i knew she was right. visor or no visor, i too knew it was lewis waller; it was lewis waller, slamming and banging british drama as none better could than he, by insisting, in his silver armour, on being always waller, never henry v. they are all like that: mr gerald du maurier may dress himself up as a policeman, or swathe his neck in a choker, or get into evening clothes and pretend to be a burglar, but thick over those artifices lies always the charming du maurier trail. he is loved for that, just as beerbohm tree was loved for the confectionery of his voice and the circular movement of his hand, as mr hawtrey is loved for his sober cynicism, and miss doris keane for ... i don’t know exactly what. whatever actors are loved for, it is always for being themselves and never for being their parts; whether, like miss lilian braithwaite, they have cast themselves for the lilies and languors of virtue, or, like miss dorothy minto, for the roses and raptures of vice, to those selections they must cleave, or they shall be loved no more. but if they do cleave to these selves of theirs, then shall they attain fame, and the public will not say: ‘have you been to hamlet?’ but ‘have you seen martin harvey?’ and this worship shapes yet another stone to hurl at the english theatre, namely, fantastic salaries, varying between ￡100 and ￡300 a week. call me a bolshevik if you like, but i say no man is worth ￡300 a week; nobody knows this when the man is alive, but everybody does the day after he is dead. this would not matter if it did19 not make the theatre so expensive to run, therefore the prices of the seats so high that only those who can afford it sit in them. the richer the staging, the poorer the play; the dearer the seat, the greater its attraction to the people who know ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ for long purses are made of sows’ ears.
i wonder if something could be done for the theatre. supposing it were built like the scala, so that nobody sat at the sides, so that everybody might see the play instead of hats, so that one might have a fit in the stalls and be removed without causing too much trouble (you see, i think of everything), so that the people at the top were not seated so high as to observe mainly the actors’ upper skulls. supposing a theatre like the munich kammerspiele, which holds five hundred, were to be built. supposing, like that one, it had but one balcony; supposing it were cheap to light; supposing, too, that it had no programme sellers, but delivered programmes at the doors from a penny-in-the-slot machine; supposing it had no cloak-room attendants, but hooks with a number and a padlock; supposing it had no ... i forget the name of the attendant, something like pew-opener, and that the seats were not numbered from a.26 to m.34 in the stalls, not numbered at all in the pit, and re-numbered again in the upper circle; supposing the seats were just numbered 1, 2, 3, so that one could find them; supposing we paid actors for rehearsals and engaged them for a certain term; supposing all this, would the public be pleased? i wonder! i wonder whether the public would like paying less for its seats. if stalls did not cost 10s. 6d., would it trust the play? it certainly does not trust the doctor who charges less than 10s. 6d. and yet, once upon a time, the theatre was cheap. when, sixty years ago, ben webster was producing at the adelphi, a stall cost 5s., and mr webster offered amphitheatre stalls ‘with elbows and cushions, secured the whole evening’ for 1s.
yes, a good deal might be done like this. a good deal might be done by the lord chamberlain and the london county council, if only they would cease to devote all their thoughts to exits from20 the theatre. (on consideration, this may be well advised.) they might allow smoking, and best of all, they might allow everything, suspend all censorship, and be assured that the plays which are called objectionable would not be staged. i do not mean that there is no demand for objectionable plays; there is; indeed, we nearly all of us like objectionable plays, but the puritans can trust our puritan feeling, which makes it impossible for us to enjoy objectionable plays because we dare not be seen enjoying them by other people who are also enjoying them. ah! if you could go to the play masked it would be different.
what is wrong with the drama is that it does not hold an idea to the square act; is it worth saving? for it may truly be said that the only fault the public finds in a stupid play is that it is not stupid enough. you do not believe me. let us look at the list of plays in to-day’s paper. to-day there are open thirty-six metropolitan theatres, including some we can leave out, maskelyne’s, drury lane (opera), the philharmonic. of the remaining thirty-three, musical comedy occupies six stages. say no more about that. if it were not for the lips that sing, our attention would be concentrated on english music. revue rages at five theatres. this leaves twenty-two plays running. among them are two spy plays, two comic war plays, a mystical melodrama, four farces; the rest consists in plays made by hands unassisted by heads, plays that the next generation may make by machinery. the groans of old age are heard as sir arthur pinero rigs the freaks upon their legs, as mr somerset maugham presents love in a cottage. and dear brutus is the twinkling star that makes darker the thalian night.
in hardly one of these plays is there a single moment of intellectual distinction. i do not mean that i ask those twenty-two stages to make up the night’s programme of king lear, ghosts, les trois filles de monsieur dupont, the sunken bell, the knight of the burning pestle, but i do think that their coalition might give us more than dear brutus. there should be plenty of room for true comedy of the type of the admirable crichton, mrs gorringe’s necklace, john bull’s other island, the cassilis21 engagement, chains, comedy with ideas. there should be room for the shewing-up of blanco posnett, the playboy of the western world and other solid plays. but one condition is that we should pay for plays, not players. we do not. if you want evidence consider the following advertisement of when knights were bold (a really amusing play):—
when knights were bold.
bromley
challenor
‘bromley challenor has a personality and fun of his own.’—times.
‘an individual style of his own.’—daily telegraph.
‘a manner quite his own.’—the queen.
‘nothing funnier than the second act.’—daily telegraph.
‘his fun is infectious.’—daily graphic.
‘keeps his audience in convulsions.’—star.
‘had a triumphant reception.’—daily chronicle.
‘bromley challenor extracts every spark of fun.’—j. t. grein, sunday times.
‘the play went more gloriously than ever.’—referee.
marjorie
bellairs
‘miss marjorie bellairs is a charming actress with a singularly sweet voice.’—era.
ten press quotations. two refer to the play; one may refer to play or to actor; seven refer to the actor only. (the playwright is not mentioned, but never mind). this does not mean that the newspapers confined their notices to mr bromley challenor, but it does mean that the management selected for quotation only the phrases which refer to the actor, because that is what the public wants, and what it gets for the hastening of its mental decay.
what is wrong with the theatre is, to a certain extent, right22 with the music-hall, and this for two reasons: we have to deal with a different kind of playgoer, and the excessive valuation of the actor is sharply limited by the worth of his songs. i have seen ernie mayne, ella shields, and others rouse the house with one song and half-fail with another. the theatre-goer, who, on the whole, is not a music-hall-goer, is usually either in a smug condition, or over-conscious of his digestive process. nearly all the pit and upper circle, and the bulk of the dress circle, feel that they are indulging in a respectable spree. leaving aside the one who, in the newspapers, signs his letters as ‘old playgoer’ (generally an old fool), or ‘old firstnighter,’ probably an old lunatic (because the first night is the worst night), the cheaper seats in a theatre are tenanted mainly by people in a stupefied state of admiration. they have escaped for a few hours from the dug-outs of respectability; their families have not long emerged from the tradition that the theatre is a place of evil repute; some even believe that they are improving their minds, which is touching, whatever the condition of their minds. they file their programmes. they loudly proclaim to their friends that they ‘ought’ to go and see such and such a play. perhaps they go because they ought to. perhaps they go to dream dreams; no doubt nightmares do not disappoint them. the stalls are not in search of virtue tempered with a little vice; most of their patrons are confessedly in search of vice neat. they never get it. and if this vice, invisible to anybody who is not a bishop or the editor of a sunday paper, is necessary to their health, it is because they visit the theatre in a state of advanced repletion, because they are people who manage to be replete in the middle of a european war; such is their nature. no wonder, then, that the cold suet of the drama should have so securely become wrapped in the wet dish-cloth of the playgoer. thus, it may be true to say that the playgoer gets the plays he deserves. the music-hall-goer is different.
if it is true that many go to the theatre when they have eaten too much, it is, to a certain extent, true that many go to the music-hall when they have drunk too much, which, if i must choose, is less repulsive. they are frankly out for a rag; they want to23 laugh, and i had rather they guffawed than drowsed. you can’t drowse in a music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, in his elaborately luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, addresses his first and infinitely disabused bow to the audience, to the time when he calls upon the band to produce the smallest possible scrap of ‘god save the king,’ and hurries out loyalty on the wings of ragtime, there is no flagging. it is not only that red-nosed comedian and eccentric comedienne, american dancer, or sketch got up regardless, tread upon each other’s heels; the main thing is the band, the harsh, rapid band, that never stops, that plays anything, providing it is the thing of the day, with all the regularity and indifference of the typewriter. from it gush patriotism, comedy or sentiment, and all three burst forth with their full headline value. there is no tickling of big drums; when the drum is banged you know it; nor is there measure in the sigh of the oboe, for the music-hall paints not in wash-greens and grays; scarlet, black, white, and electric-blue are its gamut.
nothing else would satisfy the audience that every music-hall comedian must encounter every night. it is a mixed audience. there are old stagers who sit in the same seat every saturday night, without looking at the programme, and this differentiates them from the playgoer: they are bound for a playground. there are the discriminating who follow the star, so long as the star’s songs refrain from appealing to what is described as their better feelings; there are the very young in search of excitement, and determined to get it; there are the slightly older, who come in pairs, and do nothing to conceal the fact. (of late years, many of these have been lost to the music-halls and have taken to the cinemas because they are darker.) but one thing unites them all: they have come here to be amused, amused at once, amused all the time; they are not ready to make allowances; if an old song is a good song, it is a good song, but if it is not a good song the seasoned music-hall-goer will know it at once. i have heard him turn to his neighbour and say: ‘it’s all up. she won’t get across.’ getting across the footlights is not, in a music-hall, the24 same thing as getting across in a theatre. the music-hall performer has no scenery to help him, in this sense, that the properties are well known to the audience. i have seen at least twenty turns at the shepherd’s bush empire in front of a drop-curtain which i swear is croydon high street. the words of the song are, as a rule, difficult to sing. often, as in the case of george robey, the costume is stereotyped and never varies. thus the music-hall performer, having not the scenery of harry hope, or the knee-breeches of malvolio, can rely on nothing but himself. he comes naked into an entirely cold world. his situation is ideally expressed by the old cartoon of the impresario, his foot bound up to show that he has gout. before him stands the dingy figure of a little performer. this is their dialogue:—
impresario: ‘what’s your line?’
performer: ‘comedian.’
impresario: ‘well! get on with it! make me laugh.’
if within one minute of his appearance the performer has not got his laugh he will probably not get it at all. if he is famous, and if his turn is not too bad, nothing worse will happen than the administration of the frozen lemon. it is rather tragic, feeling the lemon come. you feel the audience leap up towards the performer, for it is always ready to give him his chance, even if he is unknown; then, in a minute or so, you feel the audience drop away from him; you are aware that he is not being listened to, for people begin to talk, to flutter with their programmes, and perhaps some one may hum an irrelevant air. the wretched performer knows it. if you are sitting in the first row of the stalls you see anxiety come over his face. he begins to shout or to dance rather wildly; he knows that he is not getting across; he tries to attract attention as a cockatoo if he cannot do so as an eagle. then some one laughs derisively, and there is something hideous in that laughter; it makes one think of the thumb-down attitude in the roman circus. the curtain drops in the middle of something that is half hum and half silence. that is the lemon.
25 it is only in extreme cases that the audience manifests disapproval. indeed, it is an audience full of good-natured contempt, and if the lemon is taken it willingly passes on to the next turn; as a rule, the lemon is taken by the management, who ring down the curtain on the first song and do not let the performer come on again. but if the performer does come on again, and strives to recapture lost ground, the audience will give him thirty seconds to do it; if he fails, the hum grows angry as that of a swarm of bees. there is more derisive laughter; a few yells come from the gallery; a general uproar develops from the hum. you discern cries: ‘i want to go ’ome’.... ‘take me back to mother.’ ... opponents reply as loudly: ‘shut up! chuck him out!’ but the voices resume in more and more sepulchral tones: ‘i want to go ’ome,’ while others join the rag for the rag’s sake, and some stentor high above roars: ‘shut yer face, dear, i see yer christmas dinner.’ and then everybody cries: ‘chuck him out!’ while the performer sings louder and louder, and the band makes still more desperate efforts to drown his song. then a large portion of the audience rise to their feet and bellow enmity until the curtain goes down. that is the scarlet bird, and i have not often seen it on the wing.
no, there is no mercy in the music-hall audience. for it is an honest audience, and is, therefore, capable of every brutality. also, everybody has paid for his seat. nobody there can afford to waste that small payment. they must get their money’s worth. they know exactly what they want; they have been wanting it ever since the middle ages, and, on the whole, have been getting it. they want rough and obvious jokes told in a subtle and intelligent way; they want to see the performer break plates or sit on the butter, but he must do it in a debonair style; they want songs of which they know the tune by the time the second couplet is reached, favourite songs of which they can bellow the choruses while the triumphant performer whispers it; above all, they want their traditional jokes. cheese, lodgers, mothers-in-law, twins, meeting the missus at 3 a.m., alcoholic excess, one or more of these must be introduced to make a26 successful song. it does not matter who you are, whether the great mcdermott, dan leno, or r. g. knowles, you must tie your little bark to the great ship of the english music-hall tradition. no famous song has become famous unless a portion of it at least dealt with one of these subjects: ‘champagne charlie,’ ‘i’m following in father’s footsteps,’ ‘the girl, the woman, and the widow,’ are clear evidences of this. perhaps that is why some delicate artists, such as maidie scott and wish wynne, have never quite ‘got there.’ maidie scott is the most finished product on the music-halls of to-day. as soon as she comes on, her quick, schoolgirl walk, her red hair, her distrait eyes, and the voice which she knows so amazingly how to keep down to a minor key, cut her right out of the stage. when maidie scott sings ‘amen,’ or ‘father’s got the sack from the water-works’ (all along of his cherry briar pipe, because they were afraid he’d set the water-works on fire), and still more when she sings, ‘i’m glad i took my mother’s advice,’ one has a sense of extraordinary detachment. she is aloof, alone. she is so entirely under restraint; knows so well how, at last, to let her voice swell and underline her point; she knows so well how not to waste during a song the power of her splendid blue eyes, but to reserve them for that final point. thus she should wield astonishing power, yet does not quite; she lacks grossness; like wish wynne, her art is a little too delicate to get across. the audience like her, they like wish wynne singing ‘oo! er!’ and miserably dragging her little tin trunk, but never for either do they rise and roar as they do for marie lloyd.
it is true that marie lloyd takes us into another world, that of the comfortable public-house, with plenty of lights and red plush; to the publican’s dog-cart off to the derby; to the large birthday party, enlivened by plenty of sherry wine. in marie lloyd’s world everything is fat, healthy, round, jolly, bouncing; when she keeps the old man’s trousers to remember him by after he’s gone, she defines the human quality of her sentiment: she can do nothing false and artificial, such as pressing his nuptial buttonhole. marie lloyd is a woman before she is an actress, and in27 this lies her strength. when she advises the audience to ‘’ave a little bit of what yer fancy (if you fancy it, if you fancy it), ’ave a little bit of what yer fancy, i say it does yer good,’ marie lloyd is expressing the eternal claim of the flesh against the spirit, which has been rediscovered a great many times since epicurus. she survives a great generation; there is nobody to-day fit to wear her pleasantly-little shoes.
there is nobody, because the spirit of the music-hall is changing, and women, who are more adaptable than men, are feeling it first. an awful thing is happening to most of the young women on the halls; they are becoming refined. louie and toots pounds, ella retford, clarice mayne, ella shields, have nothing of the marie lloyd tradition; they are almost creatures of the drawing-room. even beattie and babs, though babs does what she can with stockings that nothing will ever keep up, never seem to experience the thick joy of being alive that marie lloyd conveys in one slow, sidelong raising of her immortal eyelid. there is, perhaps, a white hope, daisy wood, but one cannot be sure. they sing well, these young women, they dance well; they do it too well; women of the older tradition, such as victoria monks and nellie wallace are still themselves: they do not do it so well, but they do it. these are not trained, like the young women, but they have grown up and discovered themselves; they do not act joy or distress: they cut joy or distress out of common life and lay it down on the bare planks. all that is going, for the music-hall is growing refined.
let me dispel a possible misunderstanding. when i say music-hall i do not mean those sinks of virtue, the coliseum, or the palladium, the palace, and the hippodrome. those are royal theatres of varieties, eminently suited for long skirts and acrobats, and large enough for elephants. two of them can safely be handed over to revue, and the rest is silence. i have seen mr george robey, i forget whether it was at the palladium or the coliseum, and the place was so broad, and so deep, and so high, that his eyebrows looked normal: can i add anything to the horror of this picture? the only comedian who ever seemed to me a28 success in those barns was little tich, as little miss turpentine, because they made him still smaller, which heightened his effect. but those halls pay large salaries, and i suppose they will go on. indeed, i fear that they are gaining ground because we are daily sinking deeper in the joseph lyons civilisation, where everything must be cheap, gilt, and enormous. the old halls, the holborn, the metropolitan, the bedford, collins’s, will not last long; already many halls have been seized, the tivoli and the canterbury by cinemas, the shepherd’s bush, i think the paragon, mile end, and certainly the shoreditch empire by sir oswald stoll. we have to count with sir oswald stoll. together with sir joseph lyons, he has done more to drive out merrie england than the dourest champion of methodism. you can go to his music-halls, or to the palladium, which is not a stoll hall, but a stollomorphe, and nothing will offend your good taste. during the last dozen years sir oswald stoll has been engaged in a continuous and painfully successful campaign to raise the english music-hall; he has almost succeeded in elevating it. true, in his halls appear all those men who carry on the old tradition and glorify the flesh: george robey, sam stern, ernie mayne, sam mayo, who sing the crude joy of poor life, which is found in drunken sprees and conjugal misunderstandings, but which yet is true life. little by little their songs grow less broad. sam mayo would not, at a stoll hall, sing the ditty which used to delight the old middlesex: ‘ching chang, wing wang, bing, bang, boo,’ nor would dutch daly sing about the larks in may. our old comedians are limiting their humours, discolouring their noses, rolling their umbrellas. the young ladies in the audience, and their young gentlemen, modern forms of the donah and her bloke, would feel uncomfortable if too crudely reminded that love is something more than kisses on brighton pier under a pale pink sunshade. the old comedians are not yet dead, and ernie mayne can still sing:—
29
‘last night i wandered thro’ the park,
i met a female after dark;
and, feeling faint for want of food,
i fell into her arms—how rude!
just then she murmured “kiss me,
george!” her face i chanced to see,
the girl was black, with nigger lips;
i shouted, “not for me!”
it’s my meatless day, my meatless day,
i’m not going to eat any sort of meat.
meat, meat, meat, meat,
i’m thin and pale, all i’ve put away
is two roly-polies, never left a crumb,
three currant puddings and a little bit of plum,
and five apple-dumplings are rolling round my tum,
’cos it’s my meatless day.’
yes, ernie mayne may still sing his songs of araby, but little by little he is being borne down by the american raconteur, whose impropriety is always in the best of taste, by the ragtime dancer, by the wandering italian fiddler, by the respectable eccentric at the piano, by the juggler, by the refined soprano, who sings ‘god send you back to me, over the mighty sea,’ or, ‘there’s a little mother always yearning for the ones that long to roam.’ it’s all getting so clean, so precious pure. the old comedian will not last long. he that was once a bull in a china-shop will soon become a stolled ox.
but the worst may yet have to come. a new demon is arising in the shape of the cinema. it is as if merrie england, that once lived at the surrey theatre and the globe, and was driven out when the middle class began to frequent the theatre about 1870 and took refuge in the caves of harmony, then doubled back into the tivoli and the oxford (fortunately to provide what the late w. t. stead called ‘drivel for the dregs’), were being pursued. wherever merrie england goes, it seems that, as mark sheridan used to put it, ‘the villain thtill purthued her, purthued her, purthued her.’ when the music-hall has been completely improved i wonder whether he will be glad to have ‘purthued her’ to such good purpose. certainly, in the cinemas, little is left of the old30 spirit that arose as one drank one’s beer in the stalls at the old mogul, for the cinema, let police magistrates say what they like, bears deep upon its brow the brand of abel.
the cinema, like most new and virile things, has split opinion, and has collected round itself more unwise friends and unthinking enemies than any other form of entertainment. few people like cinemas; they either love them or loathe them, while a few, i suppose, fall into my section of feeling and hate them for not being better than they are. for i believe in the cinema; i do not think that the cinema will do away with the theatre and the novel, but i do believe that it is destined to play a still larger part in the amusement of the people. also, i believe that it is destined to play a cleaner, that is, a more artistic part. how far it can be brought, i do not know, because i do not suppose that i am the one chosen by nature to raise it high; but if we consider films such as the birth of a nation, or intolerance, where mr d. w. griffith, a man of some slight culture, is not entirely devoid of taste, and certainly bold in his conceptions, audacious in his execution, we cannot wave the cinema away with a sneer at cowboy drama.
the cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on horseback, by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, for the first time, movement could be reproduced. the reproduction of movement was a new pleasure, and so the mob clamoured for it. carry yourself back to your first film and, be you as highbrowed as you like, you will not deny that you enjoyed those febrile races, those people falling out of windows, crashing through ceilings, the violent opening and shutting of doors, the rush of flying crockery. then you grew tired of it and began to think it silly. well, it was silly, and it is silly, but we should remember that the pioneers of the cinema were americans of the travelling-showman type, men whose fathers had exhibited the camera obscura loved of our fathers; they had passed through dissolving views, and that type of man could not be expected to like, and therefore to put forward, a dramatic version of paradise lost. briefly, the cinema was put forward by the vulgar, for the31 vulgar, but by degrees, as the mob grew weary of movement for movement’s sake, as the profits increased, new men such as pathé, urban, gaumont, came in. they were commercial men, but not vulgar men, men who realised that if there was a public for the novels of mr e. f. benson and the plays of mr alfred sutro, there must be a cinema public for something less lurid than the early films. by degrees, the cinema improved; it improved in conceptions when subjects such as quo vadis?, the walls of jericho, bella donna, appeared on the film; yet more ambitious things were done in the shape of hamlet, julius c?sar, justice, intolerance, and many more.
the film improved, too, in its actual execution. the earliest type of film actor was scraped up from the east side gutters of new york and the graving-docks of naples. for that early cinema you needed creatures immensely unrestrained, yelling, dancing, dirty creatures, not at all the people who could have impersonated what the old lady in the pit called the ‘married life of the dear queen.’ and as the subjects changed the actors changed; many were taken from the stage; some, to this day, preserve certain characteristics of the ordinary human being. it is not quite their fault if they do not preserve them all; the cinema has had time to make a tradition of its own, which is still represented by the american posters we see upon the walls, where the heroines have enormous eyes and more teeth than lulu dentifrice; where the young men have straight backs to their heads, half a pound of white meat on each cheek, a rugged brow, or an emetic grin, briefly, the most brutal type of chicago commercial rigged out in the dress clothes of a suicide; where ladies whose clothing is too low for blouses and too high for evening frocks, whose jewels flash beyond the dreams of gophir, quaff the sparkling champagne wine. where the illustrator manages to make miss irene vanbrugh look vulgar. where american policemen (or admirals, you never know) arrest crooks in mid-air; where all is six-shooters, bowie-knives, cinches, and snarks. like poster like player, is, to a certain extent, true, for the producer is still a cross between pimple and the sort of stockbroker whose silk32 hat glitters in eight places. (observe the band on his cigar.) but that producer, like that poster, is the old tradition, and is giving way before the ordinary business man who does not see the world in terms of banana falls. that new man is not pressing his actors as the old producer did. he still makes them register, but less intensely. register means to mark the emotions. when the hero is being filmed, and the heroine enters, he smiles; if he does not smile beatifically enough the producer will cry to him: ‘register delight!’ you have all seen the result. in the old days they were registering all the time; you could see the heroine registering terror, while the hero registered nobility, and the villain registered hate; meanwhile, the old mother dropped a stitch and registered benevolence with extreme pertinacity, and, all the time, servants in the background were registering national pride and rectitude. one still has to do these things on the cinema because, after all, the cinema picture has to be photographable. it has to be seen rather plainly, but the cinema producer has begun to understand that, to be effective, facial expression need not be recognisable a mile away.
it is the excessive vigour of the cinema has endeared it to londoners; most of them are a rather lymphatic crowd, because they live in too large a city, surrounded by too many interesting things, because they eat rather bad food and not enough of it, and also because most of them work in stuffy offices and factories. thus they need strong stimuli if they are to react, and no doubt that is why cinemas are being established one by the side of the other, and run for ten hours a day. like the sensational stories in the magazines, like the newspapers which consist in much headline and little text, they spur this tired creature. the more he is spurred, the more tired he grows. the more tired he grows, the more he needs spurring. so the cinema must prosper. but i think it will prosper in a more moderate way; it will continue to grow, to absorb theatres and music-halls; it has already absorbed the coronet, the canterbury, sadler’s wells, the tivoli, the scala, the london opera house, and others; but i think it will more and more tend to produce the historical film, films based33 on novels and plays of some slight merit; that it will increasingly provide bearable music. for a while it may not originate much, and therefore it will not easily become a form of art. i am not sure that it can become a form of art, though i do not know why: the ballet is a form of art, and people like nijinsky, pavlova, madame rambert (let alone taglioni and genée) have made a great deal of it. i do not say that it is impossible for the cinema to produce a work of art, but this must be within the limits of pantomime, which are close and narrow limits. subtle emotions it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this, because she thought that he thought that.’ (if a cinema company will film the golden bowl, i will burn seven candles as an offering to the albert memorial.) all that, the cinema must leave to the play and the novel. it cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. because it cannot speak, it must move, and so it is a different kind of thing.
that does not mean that it need always be the rather crude thing it is to-day. as people of better taste come into the business, we are likely to do away with a few of the continual changes of scene; we shall reduce repetitions, such as the woman who endlessly rocks the baby’s cradle between every tragic scene in intolerance. repetition is the way in which a crude taste rams its point home; a fine taste will select its points better, need to make them less obvious, know how to vary them. the selective art of the novelist can thus be applied. also, the finer taste will not corrupt the actor as hitherto he has been corrupted, by leading him into a wilderness of monkeys. the cinema will learn restraint, that first need of all art. some of the actors, such as norma talmadge, pauline frederick, mary pickford, and especially charlie chaplin, have already evolved a new form of acting, and not a mean one. when charlie chaplin runs along a road, in that queer, lolloping way which starts from the shoulders and animates his fingers and his elbows, chasing a rolls-royce that is34 obviously travelling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, when thereupon he falls into a ditch, and extricates himself with an air of incredulity, when he then appears to realise, with a detachment that none but plato could have equalled, that he is not likely to catch that car, and decides to go home, charlie chaplin does a wonderful thing: he turns his back on the audience, and you know, from a little ripple in his back that he is considering the situation. then the head gives a jerk, one of the shoulders goes up, the fingers give a twist, and long before charlie chaplin turns round to face the audience, with his soft eyes laughing, his animate body has told you what he meant: ‘it’s gone. oh, well, i don’t care.’ the popularity of others may wane, but charlie chaplin is a monument. as in the case of the music-halls, a merciless audience has formed, and its love has readily been given to the best.
