Part 16

Chapter 163,914 wordsPublic domain

Sooner or later some modern magician, in advance over his rivals, will take this final step, and the curtain will rise on a stage with a box-set realistically reproducing a handsome room, with all its decorations and hangings and furniture in harmony, Jacobean in style, or Chippendale, as the performer's preference may be. There will be chairs and tables in their proper places; there will be book-cases, and window-boxes of flowers; and perhaps there will be a cellaret, where the performer may procure any goblet or decanter he needs. There will be a broad desk in the center, with its writing-pad and its book-rack, and possibly its heap of magazines and weekly papers. This set thus furnished will look like a room that has really been lived in; it will have a door in each of the side walls, and when the curtain rises the stage will be empty. Then the doorbell will ring, and the servant will enter at one door, and, going across the stage to the other, he will admit his master--the master at last of the truly modern art of magic. The magician will give his hat and coat to the servant, who will take them out, and who will never appear on the stage again except in response to the master's pressure on the electric button, ordinarily used to summon a servant. And the magician will present his succession of experiments in magic, utilizing only the objects which he may borrow from the spectators, or which would naturally be found in a gentleman's room. The apparent absence of all apparatus, the naturalness of the environment, the easy simplicity and the convincing reality of the back-ground--all these elements will coalesce to heighten the effect of the marvels to be wrought by a comedian playing the part of a magician.

(1912.)

XVI

THE LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY OF PUNCH AND JUDY

When we consider how cosmopolitan is the population of these United States, and how freely we have drawn upon all the races of Europe, it is very curious that the puppet-show does not flourish in our American cities as it flourishes in many of the towns on the other side of the Western Ocean. The shrill squeak of Punch is not infrequent in the streets of London--altho it may not now be heard as often as it was a score of years ago. In Paris in the gardens of the Tuileries and of the Luxembourg, and again in the Champs-Elysees where the children congregate in the afternoon, there are nearly half a dozen enclosures roped off and provided with cane chairs so that spectators, old and young, may be gladdened by the vision of Polichinelle, and by the pranks of Guignol. Yet even in Paris there are not now as many puppet-shows as there were fifty years ago; and in Italy and in Germany the traveler fails to find as frequent exhibitions of this sort as he used to meet with in the years that are gone. Apparently there is everywhere a waning interest in the plays performed by the little troop of personages animated by the thumb and fingers of the invisible performer. And perhaps the declining vogue of this diminutive drama in old Europe is one reason why it has never achieved a wide popularity in young America.

In France the puppet-show is stationary; it has its fixed habitation and abode; and its lovers can easily discover where to find it when they seek the specific pleasure it alone can provide. In England the spectacle of Punch and Judy is ambulatory; the bloodthirsty hero and the bereaved heroine roam the streets at large, and their arrival in any one avenue of traffic can never be predicted with certainty. In the United States poor Punch has never ventured to show his face in the open street, seeking the suffrages of the casual throng; he is not peripatetic but intermittent, and he makes his appearances only in private houses, and only when he is sent for specially to entertain the children's party. Here in America Punch is still a stranger to the broad public; he has an exotic flavor; he suggests Dickens, somehow; and he must be wholly unknown to countless thousands who would rejoice to make his acquaintance and to laugh at his terrible deeds.

His terrible deeds!--perhaps there is in these words a possible explanation for the failure of Punch to win favor among the descendants of the Puritans, who are always inclined to apply severe moral standards of conduct. Now, if we apply any moral standard at all to the conduct of Mr. Punch, the result is simply appalling, for the customary drama of which he is the sole hero sets before us a story of triumphant villainy, adequately to be compared only with the dastardly history of Richard III in Shakspere's melodramatic tragedy. Mr. Punch is an accessory before the fact in the death of his infant child, and when his devoted wife very naturally remonstrates with him, he turns upon her with invective and violence--a violence which culminates in assassination. Having once seen red and tasted blood, he finds himself swiftly started upon a career of crime. His total depravity tempts him to a startling succession of hideous murders. He slays an inoffensive negro, a harmless clown, and a worthy policeman. Then he succeeds, by a simple trick, in hanging the hangman himself. By his fatal assaults upon these two officers of justice, the necessary policeman and the useful hangman, Mr. Punch exhibits his contempt for the majesty of the law. He stands forth, without a shred of conscience, as a practical anarchist, rejecting all authority. His hand is against every man and every man's hand is against him. And having violated the laws of this world, he finally discloses his callous contempt for the punishment which ought to await him in the next world; he has a hand-to-hand fight with the devil himself--a deadly struggle from which he emerges victorious. And this is the end, which crowns the work.

When we consider the several episodes of Mr. Punch's abhorrent history, we are reluctantly forced to the conclusion that his story is even less informed with morality than that of Richard III. The crookbacked king comes to a bad end at last; he meets with the just retribution for his many misdeeds; and he falls before the sword of Richmond. But Mr. Punch comes to a good end, and so far as we may know, he lives happy ever after, like the princes and princesses of the fairytales. He may even marry again and have another child, to be made away with in its turn. The more we consider his misdeeds and his misadventures the more shocking they are to our moral sense. Mr. Punch appears as a monster of such hideous mien that to be hated he needs but to be seen. This is how he must appear to every one of us who applies a moral standard to the drama, and who is willing to hold every character in a play to a strict accountability for his words and deeds. If we apply this moral standard to the play of Punch and Judy, then that play must be dismissed as profoundly and hopelessly immoral, carrying ethical infection to all who are so unfortunate as to be spectators at its performance. And more particularly, it is an absolutely unfit piece for the young, whose immature minds need to be guarded against everything which might tend to confuse the delicate distinctions between right and wrong.

But, of course, we do not apply a moral standard to the sayings and doings of Mr. Punch, for the plain and sufficient reason that he is not a human being. He is not a man and a brother, upon whom we may be tempted to pattern ourselves. He is but a six-inch puppet, a thing of shreds and patches, a wooden-headed doll, vitalized for a moment only by the hand concealed inside his flimsy body with its flaunting colors. He is too fantastic, too impossible, too unreal, too unrelated to any possible world, for us to feel called upon to frown upon his misdeeds or to take them seriously. He is a joke, and we know that he is a joke, and all the children know that he is only a joke. Even the youngest child is never tempted to believe in his existence and to be moved to follow his example or to imitate his dark deeds. The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and the proof of a play is in the effect it produces upon the spectators. We may question whether any one of the millions of performances of the lamentable tragedy of Mr. Punch has suggested to a single father the fatal neglect of his offspring or to a single husband the possibility of wife-murder. And we may doubt whether any child, after witnessing Mr. Punch's murderous combats with the policeman and the devil, has ever felt any lessening of his respect for those two time-honored guardians of law and order.

The plea of confession and avoidance which is here set up for Punch and Judy is much the same as that set up by Charles Lamb for the frolicsome Restoration comedies. Lamb admitted that they were degradingly immoral--if you took them seriously and accepted them as pictures of life. But he insisted that they were not really amenable to this moral standard, since they were plainly impossible in any world known to man. Macaulay had no difficulty in showing that Lamb was judging others by his clever and sophisticated self. To Lamb the creatures of Wycherley and Congreve might reveal manners and customs which removed them from the sphere of recognizable humanity; but the majority of his fellow-spectators were not so nimble-witted; they saw characters on the stage personated by living performers, and they beheld these characters shamelessly doing shameful things. Because the persons in the play were represented by actual human beings they seemed indisputably human; and their deeds could not be considered as outside morality. Yet the plea made by Lamb for the Restoration comedies has a certain validity when it is put forward in behalf of Mr. Punch. He is not personated by an actual human being; and even the least sophisticated of juvenile spectators does not accept him as a fellow-creature strictly amenable to the human code.

Historians of the Greek drama have often commented on the fact that the Athenian actors wore towering masks, and that thereby they were deprived of all facial expression. In our snug modern theaters, with their well-lighted stages, we follow with our eyes the shifting emotions as these chase each other across the faces of the actors; and this is one of our keenest pleasures in the playhouse. In the huge theater of Dionysius at Athens, with its ten or twenty thousand spectators, seated tier on tier, along the curving hillside of the Acropolis, the actor was too far removed from most of the playgoers for any play of feature to be visible; and critics have commiserated the Attic dramatists on their deprivation of this element of potent appeal. Yet the question arises whether the Greek playwrights were really the losers by this immobility of the actors' faces; and we may be allowed to doubt that they were when we recall the fact that the faces of Mr. Punch and of Mrs. Judy, of the policeman and of the hangman, are also fixed once for all. The expression that Mr. Punch wears when he is fondling the baby is, perforce, the same which illuminates his face when he is engaged in joyful combat with the devil, a foeman worthy of his stick. Here the imagination of the spectator comes to the rescue. The wooden head of Mr. Punch is unchanging, no doubt; but those who gaze entranced upon his marvelous doings never miss the play of feature which they would expect if they were part of the audience in a playhouse for grown-ups. Quite possibly the Athenian spectators did not mind the immobility of the masks their actors wore; indeed, that very immobility may have been an incentive to their imaginations. When the Greeks went to their open-air theater, as when we gather around the tent-like theater of Mr. Punch, they knew in advance, as we also know, that the faces of the performers would be unchanging; therefore they did not expect any variety of expression; and probably they got along as well without it as we do at a puppet-show.

There is another likeness between Attic tragedy and Punch and Judy; there is a limitation in the number of characters we are allowed to see at the same time. As the hidden performer who operates all the figures has only two hands, he can bring before us at any one moment only Mr. Punch and one other of the several characters. The fingers of the right hand animate Mr. Punch, and the fingers of the left hand animate in turn Mrs. Judy and the negro and the clown. At Athens (for reasons which need not here be discussed) the dramatist had the use of only three actors, even tho these might each of them "double" and appear as two or more of the successive characters of the play. So it was that there were never more than three persons taking part in any given episode of an Attic tragedy as there are never more than two persons taking part in any given episode of Punch and Judy. In the thumb-and-finger plays devised in Paris by M. Lemercier de Neuville, he felt so severely the inconvenience of his limitation to two characters that he devised a kind of spiral-spring arrangement inside the costumes of his little figures to hold up their heads; and he prepared invisible supports jutting out just below the flat ledge which forms the base of the proscenium. Thus he was enabled to leave the figure in sight, while he withdrew his hand to animate another character. His _Pupazzi_, as he called them, were clever caricatures of contemporary celebrities; and he was ingenious enough sometimes to maneuver half a dozen of them at once with his single pair of hands, four adjusted into the projecting rests, and two on his fingers.

In the sumptuous puppet-show in the gardens of the Tuileries the same result is achieved by the employment of two or three manipulators, so that four or even six figures may appear at once. This has greatly enlarged the scope of the performance; and the manager of this theater has very ambitious aims. He likes to rearrange for his juvenile audience the most appropriate of the pieces which have won favor in the real theaters, and to present these with all sorts of spectacular adornments. He has even ventured to give plays as elaborate as 'Around the World in Eighty Days.' But it may be doubted whether this vaulting ambition has not overleaped itself, and whether a puppet-show does not gain rather than lose by restricting its efforts within narrower limits. After all, nothing so delights us at a puppet-show as the feats which are most characteristic and least difficult of accomplishment. We joy to behold one tiny figure belaboring another with his solid club or to follow the vicissitudes of a bout at single-stick, when both combatants thwack lustily at each other's wooden heads.

III

Yet this mention of M. Lemercier de Neuville's _Pupazzi_, with their varied repertory of Aristophanic commentaries on current events, and this memory of the spectacular efforts exhibited in the gardens of the Tuileries, suggest a possible explanation for the fact that Punch and Judy have failed to find wide-spread favor here in America and that they seem to be losing their pristine popularity in England. There is a pitiable monotony of program in all English-speaking puppet-shows. They confine their repertory to the single play which sets forth the deeds and misdeeds of Mr. Punch. Now, in the Continent of Europe there is no such monotony. Not only in the gardens of the Tuileries but in the Champs-Elysees a young spectator can sit thru performance after performance without fear of having to witness the same piece. Punch appears in only one drama, whereas his French rival, Guignol, in his time plays many parts, with a host of other characters to be his associates, some in one piece and some in another. And the several plays are adorned with a variety of scenery. Of course, there cannot be a very wide range of subject; and always is the stick a prominent feature in the miniature drama. There are a certain number of traditional Guignol pieces, handed down from generation to generation. Some of these have been printed for the use of devoted students of the drama, and some are to be had in little pamphlets for the benefit of the happy French children who may have had a puppet theater with its dozen or more figures presented to them as a New Year's gift. There is in the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University the manuscript of half a dozen of these little plays, written out (in all the license of his own simplified spelling) by the incomparable performer who was in charge of the leading Guignol in the Champs-Elysees in 1867.

It is rather curious that the English puppet-show should have confined itself for now nearly a hundred years to the unique Punch and Judy, when the puppet-shows of other countries have a changing repertory. It was a puppet performance of a German perversion of Marlowe's 'Doctor Faustus' which first introduced Goethe to the Faust legend. George Sand, unlike the great German poet in most ways, was yet like him in her delight in the puppet-show. In her country place at Nohant, she had a tiny theater of her own for which she dressed all the puppets, while her son Maurice carved the heads, painted the scenery, devised the plays, and improvised the dialog. Maurice Sand it was, sometimes alone, but occasionally with the aid of a friend, who manipulated the little figures and bestowed upon them a momentary vitality. His mother persuaded him to write out a dozen of the more successful of his little plays for puppets and to publish them; and this volume, the 'Theatre des Marionnettes a Nohant,' appeared in 1876. George Sand herself wrote a delightful account of the humble beginnings of this famous puppet-show, and described how there came in time to be all sorts of ingenious improvements for achieving spectacular effects.

She declared that the puppet-show is not what it is vainly thought, because it demands an art of a special kind, not only in the construction of the little figures themselves, but more especially in the story which these little figures are to interpret. She held that the particular field of the puppet playwright-performer was to be found in the dramatization of protracted fantastic romances, abounding in comic characters and in comic episodes and gratifying the fundamental human liking for long-drawn tales of adventure and for fantastic fairy-stories. She found in her son's acted narratives a rest from reality, a release from the oppression of every-day life, an excursion into a realm of fancy and of legend--even if the legend was itself a fanciful invention of the improvising performer. And she declared that she liked the puppet playhouse in her own home, because it was a domestic and fireside pleasure, which could be enjoyed without the exertion imposed by a visit to a real theater. Obviously she found as much delight in being a spectator--after having been a costumer--as her son did in being the author and operator of the spectacle.

There is one note to be made upon George Sand's account of the slow development of the puppet-show at Nohant, beginning as early as 1847. If you will look at any set of Punch and Judy figures hung up to-day in the toy store to tempt the eye of Young America, you will discover alongside Mr. Punch and Mrs. Judy, Jack Ketch and the Devil, a strange green figure with huge jaws and double rows of white teeth. This verdant beast has a body like all other Punch and Judy figures, a loose cloth funnel to slip over the sleeve of the operator; but its head suggests the head of an alligator, or of a crocodile, or of a dragon. Now, if you will turn to the classic text of the English play of Punch and Judy, edited with a learned introduction and an abundance of scholarly annotation by John Payne Collier--at least, so it is believed, altho the rare little book is anonymous--you will find no mention of any strange beast of this sort. Collier's text of the play is adorned by two dozen illustrations, etched by George Cruikshank, and in no one of these plates will you discover any crocodile, or alligator, or dragon. You will find Toby, the dog, who still survives in most of the few shows to be seen to-day in the streets of London; and you will find Hector, the gallant steed that Mr. Punch mounts with difficulty--and it is sad to have to record that Hector is no longer in the service of Mr. Punch. In fact, one devoted admirer of puppet-shows, whose memory goes back nearly fifty years, is ready to declare that he has never laid eyes on Hector--except in Cruikshank's illustrations. But Mr. Punch, deprived of the privilege of bestriding Hector, now enjoys the fiercer delight of overcoming the green-eyed alligator.

Here we have a question of profound historic interest. Whence came the strange beast with the wide jaws? And here is where George Sand's pleasant paper is a very present help in time of need. She tells us that her son besought her to make a green monster for one of the earliest pieces he devised for her puppet-figures. She did as she was bid, and she sacrificed a pair of blue velvet slippers to provide the marvelous creature with his gently smiling jaws. She draws attention to the fact that the slippers were blue, and to the further fact that nevertheless the strange beast was always called the Green Monster. And here may be the explanation of the historic mystery. The fame of the puppets of Nohant was borne abroad; they were talked about all thru France; and they were discussed again and again in the Parisian newspapers. What more likely than that one of the professional puppet players should have seen the infinite possibilities of the Green Monster, and should have perceived its novel fascination for children? Thereupon he borrowed it for his own performances. Certainly it is that the Green Monster is a character in at least one of the manuscript plays preserved in the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, and written out half a century ago. Probably the Green Monster strayed from the puppet-show of the Champs-Elysees sooner or later to one of the toy stores of Paris at the request of some boy who desired it for his own. When the Green Monster had elected domicile in the stores of Paris, he was soon appropriated by the toy-makers of Germany for export to Great Britain and the United States.

(1912.)

XVII

THE PUPPET-PLAY, PAST AND PRESENT