Part 10

From the days of our youth we have always had a kindness for Drury Lane Theatre, and, above all, for Drury Lane pantomime. The theatre has an individual atmosphere, the pantomime is not like the pantomime one sees anywhere else. In order to appreciate the size of the place it is necessary to put on a very small pair of knickerbockers and gaze upwards from the stalls between the chocolates and the ices. It is like looking into the deeps of heaven, though here the gods suck oranges and make cat-calls—those fascinating sounds that our youthful lips would never achieve. Drury Lane is the only theatre that preserves the old glamour. We never enter its doors without thinking of Charles Lamb, and it would hardly astonish us if Mistress Nell Gwynn came to greet us with her basket of China oranges, wearing that famous pair of thick worsted stockings that the little link-boy gave her to save her pretty feet from the chilblains. Outside, the image of Shakespeare leans on its pedestal, sadly contemplative of the grey roofs of Covent Garden. The porters who carry about bunches of bananas unconsciously reproduce the pictures of Mr. Frank Brangwyn. If Shakespeare ever slips down from his perch to watch a scene or two of the pantomime from the shadows of the auditorium, he must wonder a little at our twentieth-century masques. Like the children, he would probably appreciate the splendid colour and brightness of the spectacle, and, having been an actor himself, he would perhaps pardon the actors’ cheerful neglect of the rights of the dramatist. For modern pantomime is a business of strongly contrasted individualities rather than the product of blended and related effort. This is especially true of Drury Lane, whose stage at this season of the year is always crowded with vaudeville Napoleons and musical-comedy Cleopatras. In detail the pantomime is excellent; as an artistic entity it does not exist.

At first sight this seems rather a pity. Given a wonderfully appointed stage, gorgeous mounting, a fine orchestra, and a number of gifted performers, it is natural to expect that the result should be more than the mere sum of these units. But, as a matter of fact, pantomime is essentially formless. Those critics who clamour for straightforward versions of the old nursery stories would be vastly disappointed if they got what they wanted. The old stories are well enough when told by firelight in the nursery after tea of a winter’s evening. But they lack humour, and are not, as a rule, dramatic. (“Bluebeard,” of course, is a striking exception.) When a story lasting twenty minutes must be expanded to last four hours the story is bound to suffer. When, in addition, all the characters are played by performers whose strength lies in their individuality, it will be surprising if any part of the illusion created by the original fable survives at all.

CHILDREN’S DRAMA

AT a season of the year when children invade both the stage and the auditorium of many theatres in unwonted numbers it would be at least topical to speculate as to the philosophy of pantomime and the artistic merits and defects of child actors and actresses. But while juvenile mimicry of adult conceptions of drama is entertaining enough, it is more to our purpose to consider the dramatic spirit as it is actually present in children themselves. Pantomimes certainly do not reflect this spirit, and, in spite of the sentimental, but hardly more childish influence of fairy-plays, are still aimed exclusively at adult audiences who grant themselves no other opportunity of appreciating the humours of the music-halls. Probably the ideal children’s play would have the colour of pantomime, the atmosphere of “Peter Pan,” the poetry of the “Blue Bird,” and, most important of all, a downright melodramatic plot. It is this last that is invariably lacking in entertainments nominally provided for children; it is the first consideration in the entertainments they provide for themselves.

If grown-up people were in the habit, which unfortunately they are not, of meeting together in moments of relaxation and acting little extemporary plays, these plays would surely give a first-hand indication of the dramatic situations that interested them. Yet this is what children are always doing, and in terms of play every little boy is a dashing and manly actor and every little girl a beautiful and accomplished actress. From the first glad hour when little brother cries to little sister, “You be Red Riding Hood, and I’ll be the wolf and eat you!” the dramatic aspect of life is never absent from the mind of imaginative youth.

In one respect, at all events, these play-dramas of children should meet with the approval of modern dramatic critics. No one can accuse them of losing sight of the motive of their drama in elaboration of scenery or stage effects. A chair will serve for a beleaguered castle, a pirate ship, or Cinderella’s coach in turn, and the costumes imitate this Elizabethan simplicity. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that their stage is entirely free from the tyranny of those pernicious conventions that place obstacles in the way of art. The law of primogeniture, always rigidly enforced in nurseries, as Mr. Kenneth Grahame has observed, makes the eldest brother as much of a nuisance as the actor-manager. According to his nature, and the character of the play, he always insists on being either hero or villain, and in the absence of limelight contrives to give himself an exaggerated share both of the action and of the dialogue. Sisters are placid creatures and do not very much mind whether they have anything to do or not as long as they can all be princesses; but it is hard on a younger brother to be compelled to walk the plank, although he has the heart of a pirate chief. And the fact that whatever part he may play the eldest brother must triumph at the end of the last act tends to stereotype the lines along which the drama develops.

As for the plays themselves, it must be owned that they cover an extraordinary extent of ground, and display a variety that no other repertory theatre can hope to equal. The present writer has seen five children in one afternoon give spirited performances of Aladdin, David and Goliath, an unnamed drama of pirates, and the famous comedy of teacher and naughty pupils. This last is the standard performance of Elementary School girls all over London, and to the discerning critic displays just those faults of sophistication and over-elaboration to which long runs at our theatres have made us accustomed. The teacher is always too monotonously ill-tempered, the pupils are ill-behaved beyond all discretion; Ibsen, one feels, would have expressed this eternal warfare between youth and authority in subtler terms. Sometimes, however, London children achieve a really startling realism in their games; and the looker-on may derive a considerable knowledge of the mothers from watching the children perform in some such drama of life as the ever-popular “Shopping on Saturday Night.” It may be noted here that children’s rhapsodies over dolls and kittens, or, indeed, over anything, are always clever pieces of character-acting. Naturally, children do not rhapsodise, but they soon learn the secret of the art from observation of their elders.

But though in large towns the poorer children may not have escaped the spirit of the age, so that their art hardly raises them from the grey levels of their lives, children in general are eager to find the artistic symbol for their dreams, and allow realism but an accidental share in the expression of their romantic ideals. They do not seek the materials for their dramas in the little comedies and tragedies of nursery or schoolroom life; they prefer to forget that ordinary everyday happenings have ever wooed them to tributary laughters or tears, and fulfil their destiny as pirates or highwaymen, fairies or forlorn princesses.

Probably the nearest approach to children’s drama that we have on the modern stage is the so-called cloak-and-sword drama. Children’s plays are full of action; speeches are short and emphatic, and attempts at character-acting are desultory and provocative of laughter in the other members of the company. The fights are always carried out with spirit and enthusiasm. To have seen Captain Shark, that incarnadined pirate, wiping his sword on his pinafore is to have realised that beauty of violence for which Mr. Chesterton pleads so eloquently in the “Napoleon of Notting Hill.”

Bearing in mind the nature of the dramas that children play to please themselves, it should be possible to lay down certain rules as to the composition of plays for their entertainment. Working by light of Stevenson’s lantern, Mr. Barrie has done good work in “Peter Pan,” but he has made tremendous mistakes. The scene on the pirate ship is perfect, a model of what such a scene should be, with plenty of fighting and no burdensome excess of talk. But in a play that is essentially a boys’ play Wendy is a mistake. There was no Wendy on Stevenson’s island of treasure, and her continual intrusion into the story would not be tolerated in any nursery. In real life she would either have had to discard her sex and become a member of the band, or else have adopted the honorary rôle of princess and stayed tactfully in the background. The Pirate Chief is very good—so good, in fact, that it looks very like an eldest brother’s part, in which case he would have beaten Peter and made him walk the plank. The end, though pleasing to adult minds, is impossible from a childish point of view. The boys would never have left their fun of their own free will. The gong ought to have sounded for tea, or perhaps Mr. Darling could have returned from the City with some mysterious parcels for the children to open. That is how things really happen. To our mind, as we have said above, the greatest fault a play for children can have is the lack of a straightforward plot that allows of plenty of stirring and adventurous action. Children love stories, whether they be make-up stories of their own or real stories told them by some one else. The hero of the play should be the biggest boy acting it; the female characters should have no greater share of the action than the most rudimentary sense of politeness would allow them, but they may sit in the background, mute but beautiful princesses, as much as they like, and they are permitted to comment on the courage of the hero when occasion offers. Successful scenes should be repeated three or four times till their possibilities had been exhausted. Every now and then, if realism is desired, nurse or governess should look through the door and say, “Children, don’t be rough,” to which the whole company must reply, “We’re only playing!” Once at least in the course of the play one of the smaller members of the company should be smitten into tears, to be comforted by the princesses. The actors should quarrel freely among themselves and throw up their parts every half-hour, but, on the whole, they should all enjoy themselves enormously.

Such an entertainment, we admit, would be intolerable to the sentimental adult; but the criticisms of the children in the audience would be worth hearing.

CHILDHOOD IN RETROSPECT

“In age to wish for youth is full as vain, As for a youth to turn a child again.”

_Denham_.

IT is to be supposed that there are few men and women who do not occasionally look back on the days of their childhood with regret. The responsibilities of age are sometimes so pressing, its duties so irksome, that the most contented mind must travel back with envy to a period when responsibilities were not, and duties were merely the simple rules of a pleasing game, the due keeping of which was sure to entail proportionate reward.

And this being so, and the delights of the Golden Age always being kept in the back of our mind, as a favourable contrast to the present state of things, it is hardly surprising that in course of time, the memory of the earlier days of our life is apt to become gilded and resplendent, and very unlike the simple, up and down April existence that was really ours. The dull wet days, the lessons and the tears are all forgotten; it is the sunshine and the laughter and the play that remain. But it by no means follows that such hoarding up of pleasant memories tends to make a man discontented with his lot; it would rather seem that they impart something of their good humour to the mind in which they are stored, so that the sunshine of former jolly days returns to yield an aftermath of more sober joy, and to help to light out our later years with a becoming glow of cheerfulness. And on the other hand you will find that an habitually discontented man will be quite unwilling to own that the days of his youth, at all events, were happy.

There is no doubt that the most natural result of this glorification of our own childhood is a liking for children. Seeing them naughty or good, at work or at play, our minds straightway step back through the span of years to greet a little one who behaved in just such a way; and the sympathetic understanding thus engendered, shows us the surest way, both to manage children of our own, and to make friends with those of others.

It is impossible to conceive a man, bearing his own childhood in mind, behaving unjustly or unkindly to a child. For seeing that we perceive in every child a more or less distinct reflection of our own child nature, such conduct would be something suicidal. How much of the child is still contained within our mature mind is difficult to judge—some people have much more than others. And it is these people who can peel off their experience and knowledge like an athlete stripping for a race, and who can step out to play not only with the same spirit and excitement, but even with the same mental processes as a child; these are they who can readily obtain admission into the sacred circle of child games, and who can fancy, for just as long as the game lasts, that they are once more wandering in that fairy garden from whose easy paths of laughter and innocence our aching feet are banished for ever.

Here, then, is the cure for this nostalgia of childhood, which seizes the best of us from time to time, and causes us to batter vainly at fast-locked nursery doors, or to look sadly at the gaudy toyshops, robbed by the cynical years of their fit halo. When this melancholy falls on us, and we who are respectable forty feel like senile eighty, let us forthwith seek the company of little children, and so elude the fatal black dog. “Sophocles did not blush to play with children.” Why should we? And for those who are not fortunate enough to number in their acquaintance children of the right age and humour, here, as the cookery books say, is a tried receipt.

Take a copy of Mr. Barrie’s “Little White Bird,” together with a large bag of sweets, and sally to the park. The rest depends on your address, but for a shy man a puppy will prove an invaluable aid to the making of acquaintances. And if, as has happened to ourselves, at the end of a delightful afternoon a little lady of some seven years should, abjuring words, fling her arms round your neck and press an uncommonly sticky pair of lips on a cheek which, till that moment we will suppose better acquainted with the razor, why then, if not sooner, you will have learnt that the whole philosophy of growing old is the increasing pleasure you can take in the society of the young; this, once determined, a vista of most charming days lies before you, and sorrow for a nursery cupboard that has gone into the Ewigkeit will be forgotten in helping some diminutive neighbour to explore hers.

Southey was really stating this idea when he wrote in “The Doctor” that “A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years or a kitten rising six weeks,” though to our mind the presence of both would be the ideal arrangement, since the kitten would take the place of the puppy previously mentioned, for the child to play with.

If we wish to support age kindly, it is only to be done by surrounding ourselves with youth. And the laughter of children, surely the purest and sweetest of all music, will strike a responsive chord in our breasts, and will enable us to live through the years that wither, in all harmony and contentment.

THE FOLLY OF EDUCATION

OF all the intellectual exercises with which we solace the idle hours that we devote to thought, none is more engaging and at the same time perplexing than that of endeavouring to form a clear conception of the age in which we live. Naturally the difficulty lies, not in lack of materials on which to base an impression—indeed, we are embarrassed by the quantity of evidence that accumulates to our hand—but in the fact that it is hard to see things in true perspective when they are very near to the observer. The yet unborn historians of the present era will doubtless lack much of our knowledge, but they will be able to unravel in the quietude of their studies the tangled threads and stubborn knots that writhe beneath our fingers with the perpetual changeableness and uneasy animation of life itself. But if it is impossible to write dispassionately of a revolution while men are dying at the barricades and musket-balls are marring the bland uniformity of the wallpaper of the room in which we write, it is always open to the student of life to fall back on impressionism, the form of art that seeks to bludgeon life with a loaded phrase, rather than to woo her to captivity with chosen and honeyed words. And the brutal method is apt to prove the more efficacious, as with that frail sex that kisses, so I am told, the masculine hand that grants the accolade of femininity in that blessed state of bruiser and bruised that is Nature’s highest conception of the relationship of the two sexes. While science greets the corpse with incomprehensible formulæ and the conscientious artist gropes for his note-book of epithets to suit occasions, impressionism stops her dainty nose with her diminutive square of perfumed silk, and the dog is dead indeed.

We are all born impressionists, and it takes the education of years to eradicate the gift from our natures; many people never lose the habit of regarding life in this queer, straightforward fashion, and go to their graves obstinately convinced that grass is green and the sky is blue in dogged opposition to the scientists, didactic dramatists, eminent divines, philosophers, æsthetic poets, and human beings born blind. Some of these subtle weavers of argument would have us believe that impressionism means just the converse of the sense in which I am using the word; that, for instance, the fact that grass is green comes to us from indirect sources, as that of our own natures we would perceive it to be red or blue. But while we believe our impressions to be our own, we know that this theory has reached us indirectly, so we can well afford to ignore it. Others, again, will have it that impressions are not to be trusted; and the majority of people, while rejecting or failing to comprehend the philosophic basis on which this doubt is founded, are only too willing to accept a theory that relieves them in some way of responsibility for their own individual actions. As a matter of fact, telling a man to mistrust his impressions is like bidding a mariner despise his compass. If our senses lie to us, we must live, perforce, in a world of lies.

But as I hinted above, the young are wont to rely on their impressions from the moment when a baby first parts its lips in howling criticism of life. Children have implicit faith in the evidence of their senses until the grown-up people come along and tell grimy stories of perjured eyes and lying ears, and the unhappy fate of the unwise babes who trusted them. What is a child to do? Usually it accepts the new theory of its own inherent blindness and deafness grudgingly, but it accepts it nevertheless. It begins to rely on the experience of older human beings, as if the miracle of its own life were no more than the toneless repetition of other lives that have been before it. Wonder passes from its life, as joy passes from pencil and paper when the little fingers are made to follow certain predestined lines, instead of tracing the fancies of the moon. The child becomes sensible, obedient, quick at its lessons. It learns the beauty of the world from pictures and the love of its mother from books. In course of time its senses become atrophied through disuse, and it can, in truth, no longer see or hear. When this stage is reached the education of the individual is completed, and all civilisation’s requirements are satisfied.

I have described an extreme case, and the judicious reader will realise that the process is rarely completed in so short a time as the last paragraph suggests. But sooner or later most men and women come to believe in experience, and to this belief is due our tyrannous treatment of the young. I can conceive that an age will come that will shrink with horror from the excesses we commit in the name of education, and will regard us who force children to do their lessons against their will very much in the way in which we regard the slave-owners of the past, only with added indignation that our tyranny is imposed on the children’s minds, and not on the bodies of adults. Let those conservative readers who find this comparison a little strained reflect for a moment on what it is that we have to teach the next generation, with what manner of wisdom we chain the children’s imaginations and brand their minds. We teach them in the first place to express themselves in sounds that shall be intelligible to us, and this, I suppose, is necessary, though I should like to doubt it. Further, we invariably instruct them in the sciences of reading and writing, which seems to me frankly unfortunate. In Utopia, as I conceive it, the child who thought there was anything worth reading would teach itself to read, as many children have done before it, and in the same way the rarer child who desired to express itself on paper would teach itself to write. That any useful purpose is served by the general possession of this knowledge I cannot see. Even civilisation cannot rejoice that her children are able to read the Sunday newspapers and scrawl gutter sentiments on the walls of churches.

Beyond this we teach children geography, which robs the earth of its charm of unexpectedness and calls beautiful places by ugly names; history, which chronicles inaccurate accounts of unimportant events in the ears of those who would be better employed in discovering the possibilities of their own age; arithmetic, which encourages the human mind to set limits to the infinite; botany, which denotes the purposeless vivisection of flowers; chemistry, which is no more than an indelicate unveiling of matter; and a hundred other so-called arts and science, which, when examined without prejudice, will be found to have for their purpose the standardisation and ultimate belittlement of life.