Part 8

And that reminds me. As I sat at the Hammersmith Lyric listening to the dialogue between Peachum and Mrs. Peachum on the question whether Polly was Macheath’s wife or his mistress, the thing seemed strangely modern, and not only modern, but Gilbertian. (I am speaking, of course, of the tone, not of the sentiment—Gilbert was a very Victorian of propriety.) Peachum is Gilbertian. “Do you think your mother and I should have liv’d comfortably so long together if ever we had been married? Baggage!” Mrs. Peachum is Gilbertian. “If you must be married, could you introduce nobody into our family but a highwayman? Why, thou foolish jade, thou wilt be as ill-used and as much neglected as if thou hadst married a lord!” Again, “If she had only an intrigue with the fellow, why the very best families have excus’d and huddled up a frailty of that sort. ’Tis marriage, husband, that makes it a blemish.” Once more. “Love him! Worse and worse! I thought the girl had been better bred.” Polly herself is Gilbertian. “Methinks I see him already in the cart, sweeter and more lovely than the nosegay in his hand! I hear the crowd extolling his resolution and intrepidity! What volleys of sighs are sent from the windows of Holborn, that so comely a youth should be brought to disgrace! I see him at the tree! The whole circle are in tears! Even butchers weep!” Lucy is Gilbertian. When Macheath is at the “tree,” her comment is, “There is nothing moves one so much as a great man in distress.” And not only the tone, but the very principle of the play is Gilbertian. Gilbert took some typical figure of the social hierarchy—a Lord Chancellor, a First Lord of the Admiralty—and set the Chancellor capering and the First Lord singing about the handle of the big front door. He put a familiar figure in unfamiliar postures. Gay took a typical figure of his own time—the highwayman—and showed him, not at work on the highway, but enjoying an elegant leisure, behaving like a Chesterfield or one of Congreve’s fine gentlemen. It was the realism, the actuality of the subject, combined with the burlesque of the treatment, that delighted the London of 1728 as it delighted the London of a century and a half later. At each date it was a new experiment in opera libretto. Boswell specified the attraction of Gay’s realism—“the real pictures of London life.” Johnson singles out the “novelty” of the treatment.

But it is time that I said something about Mr. Nigel Playfair’s revival. This is a remarkable success, from every point of view. For the original attraction of realism is, of course, no longer there. We have to take it all historically. And the revival has been particularly careful of historical accuracy. Just as Gay’s dialogue prompts you to say “Gilbert,” so Mr. Lovat Fraser’s scenery and costumes prompt you to exclaim “Hogarth!” By the way, on one of Hazlitt’s visits he records the exclamation of an old gentleman in the pit, after the scuffle between Peachum and Lockit, “Hogarth, by G—d!” This was, no doubt, a tribute to the grim, ugly squalor of that particular scene. But the whole _décor_ and atmosphere of the present affair are Hogarthian—the stiff, flattened hoops of the women, the tatterdemalion aspect of Macheath’s rabble, Peachum’s dressing-gown (which I suppose is “documentary”), Macheath’s scarlet coat and flowing wig. And the dresses are accurately simple. The women wear plain stuffs; Polly alone is allowed a little finery. Indeed, there is an almost austere simplicity about the whole affair. One scene, with just the alteration of a few accessories, serves for Peachum’s house, for a tavern, and for Newgate. There is an orchestra of five strings, a flute, an oboe, and a harpsichord. It seems to me that their playing has the delicate charm of chamber music rather than the power and colour of orchestral—but I must not stray out of my province.

Hazlitt indulged in raptures over Miss Stephens, the first Polly he heard, and never failed to contrast with her her less pleasing successors. He had evidently lost his heart to her—a somewhat susceptible heart, if you think of the “Liber Amoris.” I have no Miss Stephens to compare Miss Arkandy with, and can only say the songstress is quite sweet enough for my taste and the actress a charming little doll. Miss Marquesita, the Lucy, is a good contrast, a voluptuous termagant. Boswell says of Walker, the original Macheath, that he “acquired great celebrity by his grave yet animated performance of it.” Mr. Ranalow’s Macheath is decidedly more grave than animated, is in fact a little solemn—long before he gets to the Condemn’d Hold. There is an almost Oriental impassiveness about him, something of the jaded sultan—which, after all, is not an inappropriate suggestion, surrounded as the poor man is by his seraglio of town-ladies. Miss Elsie French bravely makes a thorough hag of Mrs. Peachum; the Peachum and Lockit of Mr. Wynne and Mr. Rawson are properly, Hogarthianly, crapulous; and Mr. Scott Russell makes a good, vociferous Filch, leading with a will the fine drinking-song “Woman and Wine” and the still finer “Let us take the Road” (to the tune of Handel’s march in _Rinaldo_). Altogether a delicious entertainment: gay, despite the solemn deportment of Macheath, and dainty, despite the sordid _crapule_ of Newgate. Yes, my final impression of the affair is one of daintiness. Even the women of the town are dainty. They might almost be Dresden china shepherdesses (which would be bearing out the original suggestion of a Newgate “pastoral” very literally). For the sordid _milieu_ is so remote from us as to have become fantastically unreal; the Peachums and the Lockits are no longer ugly men, but have been turned into grotesque gargoyles; the rabble round Tyburn Tree has lived to see a Russian ballet and learnt to move in its elegant arabesques. It is a Hogarth retouched by a Shepperson—or rather, to speak by the card, by a Lovat Fraser.

GRAND GUIGNOLISM

Dandin, the judge in Racine’s comedy of _Les Plaideurs_, offers to amuse Isabelle by the spectacle of a little torturing. “Eh! Monsieur,” exclaims Isabelle, “eh, Monsieur, peut on voir souffrir des malheureux?” and Dandin, in his reply, speaks for a by no means negligible proportion of the human race: “Bon! cela fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.” Dandin was a Guignolite.

We all have our Guignolite moments, moments of Taine’s “ferocious gorilla” surviving in civilized man, when we seek the spectacle of torture or physical suffering or violent death; but we are careful to æsthetize them, refine them into moments of poetry or art. The pleasure of tragedy is æsthetic. Nevertheless, tragedy involves violent death, and without that would be an idle tale. So Rousseau was not altogether wrong when he said we go to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others suffer, without suffering ourselves. Your true Guignolite simply prefers his tragedy “neat,” without æsthetic dilution. But I think it is unfair to charge him, as he is so often charged, with a love of the horrible for its own sake. I think, rather, that he is moved, a little more actively than the rest of the world, by curiosity.

It is customary to talk of curiosity as though it were essentially ignoble. Children, women, and savages are said to have most of it. It accounts for “fortune-telling,” prophetic almanacs, spiritualistic _séances_ and other forms of alleged communication with the dead. But the truth is, curiosity, the desire to enlarge experience, is a highly valuable, or, rather, indispensable, human attribute. Without it there could be no science, no progress, and finally no human life at all. And you cannot restrict it. It must crave for all forms of experience. Some of us will be sweeping the heavens for new stars, and others will want to peep into Bluebeard’s cupboard. More particularly we are curious to know what is already known to others. We desire to see with our own eyes what others have seen and reported to us. That is why so many people have gone to _Chu Chin Chow_. We wish to realize for ourselves, by the direct aid of our own senses, “What it’s like.” And the more difficult it is to see, the greater the secrecy, the intimacy, of its actual happening in life, the greater our curiosity to see a picture or other representation of it. Hence the vogue of stage bedroom scenes, newspaper portraits of “the victim” and “the place of the crime,” and Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.

I believe that is why “cela”—the horrible, the dreadful, the gruesome—“fait toujours passer une heure ou deux” for your Guignolite. It satisfies his curiosity about an experience which in real life it is rare or difficult to obtain. For instance, they have been showing at the London Grand Guignol a representation of a criminal’s last half-hour before execution. Time was when you could see that for yourself, follow the prisoner in the cart to Tyburn, and offer him nosegays or pots of beer. In that time, enjoying the real thing, you wanted no mimic representation of it. For stage purposes you only cared to have it fantasticated—as in _The Beggar’s Opera_. To-day you cannot (unless you are a prison official or the hangman himself) enjoy the real thing; the Press is excluded; so you seek the next best thing, a realistic stage picture of it. “Realistic,” I say. That is the merit of Mr. Reginald Berkeley’s _Eight o’Clock_, wherein there is not a trace of staginess or imported sentiment. He gives you what you are looking for, the nearest substitute for the real thing. You are shown, as accurately as possible, “what it’s like.” You see how the warders behave, and how the chaplain and how the prisoner—with the result that you feel as though, for that terrible half-hour, you had been in Newgate yourself. You have gone through an experience which in actual life (let us hope) you will never have. Your curiosity has been satisfied.

And I think realism will have to be the mainstay of the Grand Guignol programmes. There is another “shocker” in the bill, _Private Room No. 6_, by a French author, M. de Lorde, which seemed to me not half so effective as the other because it was largely tinged with romance. Here again was an attempt to gratify curiosity about an unusual experience. The incident was distinctly “private and confidential.” How many of us have had the chance of seeing a fiercely-whiskered Muscovite kissing and biting a (conveniently _décolletée_) lady on the shoulder, subsequently swallowing a tumblerful of kummel at a draught, and presently being strangled by the lady’s glove? This, you may say, was realistic enough, but what made it romantic, theatrical, was the obviously artificial arrangement of the story, the “preparations,” the conventional types. You knew at once you were in the theatre and being served with carefully calculated “thrills.” That is to say, your curiosity was solely about what was going to happen next in the playwright’s scheme—the common interest of every stage plot—which is a very different thing from curiosity about strange, rare, experiences in actual life. You felt that Mr. Berkeley had really shown you “what it’s like.” You felt that M. de Lorde had only shown you what his skill in theatrical invention was like.

And there, I suspect, we reach a limitation of Grand Guignolism. The art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. The Greek tragedians did not scruple to announce their plot in advance. Lessing, in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” maintains that “the dramatic interest is all the stronger and keener the longer and more certainly we have been allowed to foresee everything,” and adds, “So far am I from holding that the end ought to be hidden from the spectator that I don’t think the enterprise would be a task beyond my strength were I to undertake a play of which the end should be announced in advance, from the very first scene.” The truth is, in the fine art of drama we are seeking what we seek in every fine art—beauty, a new form and colouring to be given to the actions and emotions of the real world by the artist’s imagination. But even on the lower plane of realism Grand Guignolism has ample scope. The one-act formula has a clear technical advantage in the single scene and strict coincidence of supposed with actual time, great helps both to unity of impression. (One counted the minutes in _Eight o’Clock_ almost as anxiously as the condemned man did.) And it has the immense fun of theatrical experiment, of seeing how far you can go, what shocks the public can stand and what it can’t, the joy of adventurously exploring the unknown and the _inédit_. Above all, if it is wise it will remember that (as I believe at any rate) its public does not yearn for the “shocking” incident merely as such, but as representing a rare experience, and it will look for some rarities that are not shocking.

A THEATRICAL FORECAST

Newspapers periodically publish their review of the past theatrical year. But it is always a sad thing to recall the past, especially the immediate past, which is too recent to be history and only old enough to be stale. Why not, then, let bygones be bygones and turn to the future, about which hope springs eternal, and which gives free scope to the imagination instead of imposing the tedious labour of research? What are our leading dramatists going to give us next year? The question might be treated in a matter-of-fact way by just going and asking them—and perhaps getting very disappointing answers. It seems more sportsmanlike to guess; besides, it leaves room for some piquant surprises when one is by and by confronted with the actual. These, then, are one or two guesses for next season.

It is long, too long, since London had a play from Sir Arthur Pinero. When he writes a play he gives you a play, not a symposium or a sermon or a piece of propagandism, but a dramatic action which interests you in its story, makes you wonder what is going to happen next, and takes care that something does happen, striking at the moment and worth thinking about afterwards. His characters are presented in strong relief, there is always a dramatic conflict of wills, his women are never insipid, are sometimes deliciously perverse, and, if not past redemption (in which case they commit suicide), are “saved” by the nearest Anglican bishop or dean. His forthcoming play will ignore the Church and will deal with a household divided on the “spiritualistic” question. The husband, who suffers from mild shell-shock and saw the “angels of Mons,” will have come back from the war a devoted follower of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Conan Doyle. The wife (Miss Irene Vanbrugh) will be a pretty sceptic, adoring her husband, but impatient of his credulity and determined to “laugh him out” of it. An opportunity occurs. The young pair have been having a sarcastic scene (a fine opportunity for Miss Irene’s merry ringing laugh) about the husband’s bosom-friend Jack, whom he had left for dead on the field at Mons. The husband eagerly hopes to get into communication with Jack “on the other side.” The wife only remembers, with twinges of conscience, certain love passages she had, before her marriage, with the said Jack, of which she has never told her husband. Now Jack is not dead, but on his way to his bosom-friend, when the wife meets him. She sees at once a chance of opening her husband’s eyes. “We’ll have a _séance_,” she says to Jack; “you shall pretend to be your own spirit, and then suddenly reveal yourself as flesh and blood—and Tom will be for ever cured of his foolishness.” Jack agrees, but he also is suffering from shell-shock (two in one play! you can imagine how clever the critics will be over this—it will have to be made clear that it was the same shell), forgets himself at the _séance_, and at sight of his old lady-love cries “Darling!”; then, horrified at his own misbehaviour, disappears, and the same night is either run over by a motor-car or tumbles into a canal. The wife’s reputation is saved by another lady present, who takes the “darling!” to herself. It is not yet settled whether this shall be a comic amorous dame, really self-deceived (say, Miss Lottie Venne), or a shrewd, kindly woman of the world (Miss Compton, for choice), who promptly sees how the land lies and sacrifices herself for her little married friend. In either case, the wife has to keep up the illusion that the voice came from “the other side,” while the husband, though confirmed in his spiritualism, is secretly disgusted to discover that the spirits can be such “bad form.” Thus the final situation is an ironic transmutation of the first. The divided pair are now united, the merry sceptic being frightened into simulating belief, while the believer ruefully finds belief without zest. Much will depend on the acting of this final situation. Miss Irene may safely be trusted to transfer her laugh adroitly to the wrong side of her mouth, but great subtlety will be required from the actor who has to convey the mixed joy and pain of a belief proved at once true and not worth having. It may, perhaps, count among Mr. Henry Ainley’s triumphs. Mr. Gerald du Maurier will play Jack the friend—another triumph, for even in his moment of breakdown he will still keep the sympathy of the audience.

Sir James Barrie has not yet exhausted the variations on his “enchantment” theme. After the enchanted wood of _Dear Brutus_, where people get a second chance in life, and the enchanted island of _Mary Rose_, where time stands still with you, he will with his next play sound enchanted bagpipes. These will be heard as a weird _obbligato_, whenever any one of the characters falls into insincerity, from _pp_ (amiable taradiddle) to _ff_ (thumping lie), and, while they are playing, the character will talk broad Scotch and sketch the postures of or, in extreme cases, wildly dance a Highland Reel. As the characters will be drawn exclusively from the Holland House set (the scene throughout will be one of the famous breakfasts), the extravagance of the compulsory fits of Caledonianism can be seen a mile off. The dismay of the poet Rogers (Mr. George Robey, specially engaged) at finding his best _méchancetés_, in his notoriously low voice, unexpectedly uttered in the broadest Scotch will only be equalled by the surprise of Sydney Smith at hearing his choicest witticisms in the same lingo. At one supreme moment the whole party will be joining in a Reel, led recalcitrantly but majestically by Lady H. Fashionable dames (a great opportunity for the costumier, and fabulous sums will be spent on the wardrobe) will suddenly change from lisping “vastly amusing I declare!” and rolled-collared _beaux_ from murmuring “monstrous fine women, egad!” to “aiblins,” “hoots, mon,” “hech, sirs,” etc. The situation will ultimately be saved by a little Scottish maiden, in a plaid (Miss Hilda Trevelyan), who, being sincerity itself, will never speak anything but the purest English, and a baby in a box nailed against the wall, who will not speak at all. For the enchanted bagpipes a squad of pipe-majors of the Black Watch, splendid fellows in review order, will be kindly lent from the Edinburgh garrison.

Mr. Maugham has been to China, and has brought back a play which will aim at being as unlike _Mr. Wu_ as possible. In fact, no Chinaman will figure in it—Mr. Maugham would never do anything so artistically vulgar as that—nor anything Chinese except a little porcelain curio of the best period. This will be sold by auction in a scene (it will be the talk of London) faithfully reproducing a celebrated establishment in King Street, St. James’s, with Mr. Hawtrey and Miss Gladys Cooper as the rival bidders. It will serve, later, for chief _pièce justificative_ in a divorce case between the same parties (with a really witty judge—for he will have the wit of Mr. Maugham—who will make a certain actual humorist on the Bench green with envy), and in the end will be broken by an excited counsel (played by the famous crockery-smashing artist from the music-halls).

Mr. Shaw—but no, it is impossible for Mr. Shaw himself, let alone any one else, to guess beforehand what Mr. Shaw will do. Finally, it may be conjectured that the rank and file of our playwrights will write for us precisely the same plays they have written before, under new titles. It would be an agreeable innovation if they would keep the old titles and write new plays for them.

A THEORY OF BRUNETIÈRE

There is a theory of the late Ferdinand Brunetière about the periods of dramatic activity which the time we are now passing through ought to put to the test. Brunetière was an incorrigible generalizer, first because he was a Frenchman, and next because he was a born critic. Criticism without general ideas, without a substructure of principle and theory to build upon, is an idle thing, the mere expression of likes and dislikes, or else sheer verbiage. This French critic was always throwing theories at the drama, and some of them have stuck. Perhaps the soundest of them and the most lasting was his theory of the drama as the spectacle of the struggle of will against obstacles. There has been much controversy about it, there has been no difficulty in instancing cases which it fails to cover, but I venture to think that as a rough generalization it still holds good. I am not, however, concerned with that famous theory for the moment. I am thinking of another theory—a historical one. Brunetière asserted that every outburst of dramatic activity in a nation will be found to have followed close upon a great manifestation of national energy—Greek tragedy, for instance, after the Persian War, Calderon and de Vega after the Spanish conquests in the New World, Shakespeare after the Armada, the French romantic drama after the Napoleonic campaigns. He might have added that the war of 1870 was followed by the best work of Dumas fils, by the Théâtre Libre, by Ibsen and Björnson, Hauptmann and Sudermann, and the Russo-Japanese War by the Moscow Art Theatre and Tchekhov.

I confess, then, my doubts about the soundness of this theory. Throughout the past history of any nation wars have been of so constant occurrence that it would be difficult not to find one preceding, by a fairly short term, any particular outburst of dramatic activity you like to fix upon. One is always _post_ the other; it is not necessarily _propter_. And instances to the contrary will readily occur: periods of dramatic activity that were not immediately preceded by, but rather synchronized with, great manifestations of national energy; for instance, the period of Corneille, Racine, and Molière. And sometimes, when you look for your dramatic sequel to your national energizing, you only draw a blank. Did any outburst of dramatic production follow the American Civil War? The theory, in short, is “an easy one,” relying on lucky coincidence and ignoring inconvenient exceptions.