Part 12

It will be impossible to communicate even the sense of it unless the material be dissociated from the event. Surely there is nothing exquisite in the roaring charwoman created by George Monroe. He had to an inspiring degree the capacity to be one of those vast figures in Dickens--Mrs Gamp to perfection--and it is odd that another impersonator, Bert Savoy, should have created, in Margie, Mrs Gamp’s own confidante and admirer, the devoted Mrs Harris. George Monroe’s creation was huge and cylindrical--more like a drainpipe than a woman in shape. There was no effort at realism, for Monroe roared in a deep bass voice, and his “Be that as it ma-a-y” was a leer in the face of all logic, order, and decency. There was in it an unrestraint, a wildness, an independent commonness which rendered it immortal. The creation of Bert Savoy is at the other extreme. It is female impersonation and the figure is always the same--the courtesan whose ambition it is to be a demi-mondaine. Savoy makes capital of all his defects down to the rakish slanting hat over one eye. His repetitions, apparently so spontaneous, are beautifully timed and spaced; the buzz and pause in the voice--“you muzzt com’over ... you don’t know the ha-ff of it, dear-ie” fix themselves in memory. He is remembered for the excellent stories he tells, and they are worth it, but the interpolations are funnier than the climax. The audacity is colossal and disarming. The occurrence of a character out of Petronius on our stage is exceptional in itself, that it should at the same time be slightly vicious and altogether charming, funny and immoral and delicate, is the wonder.

Last year there was an added touch, when Savoy danced while he sang a stanza about the Widow Brown. It was as delicate, it passed as quickly, as breath on a windowpane.[15]

I repeat the material doesn’t matter. For Leon Errol has nothing but the type drunkard to work with, and is wonderful. In his case it is easy to analyse the basis of the effect--it is in the loping dance step into which he converts the lurch of the drunkard. The tawdry moment--funny enough if you can bear it--is always Errol’s breathing into someone else’s face; the great moment comes directly after, when the lurch and the fall are worked up into a complete arc of dance steps, ending in three little hops as a sort of proof of sobriety. Jimmy Barton has the same quality in his skating scene--he uses less material and the movement round the rink is beautiful to watch. But of him it is useless to speak. Someone has pointed out that he can slap the bare back of a woman and make that funny!

It is interesting to see how many of the people who give this special quality arrive out of burlesque. Harry Kelly is another. I recall him first with Lizzie the Fish Hound in _Watch Your Step_ and last in a quite useless musical comedy, _The Springtime of Youth_ (textually that was the title--and in 1922!) For two acts he was wholly wasted. In the third he was magnificent. He was playing the obdurate father: “No son of mine shall ever marry a daughter of the Baxters” was his line. He was informed that she was, in fact, an adopted daughter and that her uncle had left her the bulk of his fortune. For precisely a minute and a half Kelly played with the word “bulk”--one saw it registered in his brain, saw an idea germinating, felt it working forward to the jaw before the cavernous voice gave it utterance--and again one felt the inner struggle _not_ to say it a third time, one felt the conflict of pride and avarice. It was remarkably delicate and fine--so is all of Kelly’s work when he has a chance. His spare figure, long hands, and unbelievable voice always create a character--and it isn’t always the same character.

Bobby Clarke’s scene with the lion comes at once to mind (it is another burlesque act), and Bert Williams--in many scenes--always soft spoken, always understanding his case. There were five minutes of Blanche Ring and Charles Winninger, once, at the Winter Garden; to my surprise, there were more than that for Eugene and Willie Howard at the same house, but they were gained in spite of the Winter Garden technique which underestimates even the lowest intelligence. Willie is rather like Fanny Brice at moments; when he cuts loose one has an agreeable sense of uncertainty. Joe Jackson,[16] actually a great clown, although one doesn’t recognize this in the highly developed medium he chooses, has exactly the opposite effect--he doesn’t cut loose at all; he develops. Everything he does is careful and nothing exaggerated, so you think at first that, although he will be funny, he will not quite reach that top notch on which an artist teeters perilously while you wonder whether he will fall over or keep his balance. Yet Jackson gets there. As the tramp cyclist his acrobatics are good, his make-up enchanting; but his expressed attitude of mind is his most precious quality. It becomes almost too much to watch him worrying with a motor horn which has become detached from the handlebars and which he cannot replace. He tries it everywhere; at the end he is miserably trying to hang it up on the air, and when it fails to catch there he is actually wretched. His movements are full of grace--like those of the grotesque, Alberto, among the Fratellini--and the ecstasy he gives comes by a surexcess of laughter. Another moment of great delicacy, without laughter, however, is that in which Fortunello and Cirrilino swing about on the broomstick. They are a lovely pair, and the little one seated on the palm of the other’s hand is a beautiful picture.

Either few women are brought out of burlesque, or women haven’t the exceptional quality I care for. In any case they have seldom given me the excess of emotion by what they have done. Their beauty is quite another matter on which I fail to commit myself. Ada Lewis, in her broad and grand way, has the stuff, and Florence Moore. And once in each performance you can be sure that Gilda Grey will utter a sound or tremble herself into a bacchanalian revel. For the most part her singing is undistinguished, and I do not care for the anxious way in which she regards her members, as if she fancied they would fall off by dint of shimmying. Yet I have never gone to a show of hers without hearing some echo of the nymphs pursued, or seeing a movement of abandon and grace. The dark shuddering voice is sub-human, the movement divinely animal.

Different in every way, but exquisite in every way, was Gaby Deslys. It is good form now to belittle her; she was so vulgar; she came so much on the crest of a revolution, she was such a bidder for our great precious commodity--news space. Ah, well! we have given publicity to less worthy causes. For she was perfect of her type, and in her hard, calculating, sublimely decent way she made us like the type. It was gently vicious--the whole manner. It was overdone--the pearls and the peacock feathers. But behind was a lovely person--lovely to look at and enchanting to all the senses. No, she couldn’t act--how pitiable her loyal efforts; she sang badly; she wasn’t one of the world’s great dancers. But she had something irreducible, not to be hindered or infringed upon--her definite self. She was, to begin with, outcast of our moral system, and she made us accept her because she was an independent human being. She had a sound and accurate sense of her personal life, of her rights as an individual. Nothing could stand against her--and it is said that when she was at grips, at the end, with something more powerful than popular taste, she still held her own, and died rather than suffer the spoiling of her beauty. If that were true one could hardly wish even her beauty back again.

_The “Vulgar” Comic Strip_

THE “VULGAR” COMIC STRIP

Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dulness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste.

Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off in ridiculous postures--a counterpart to our inveterate passion for seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes. And the fact that we do care for the comic strip--that Jiggs and Mutt-and-Jeff and Skinnay and the Gumps have entered into our existence as definitely as Roosevelt and more deeply than Pickwick--ought to make them worth looking at, for once. Certainly they would have been more sharply regarded if they had produced the counterpart of Chaplin in the comic film--a universal genius capable of holding the multitude and exciting the speculations of the intellectuals. It happens that the actual genius of the comic strip, George Herriman, is of such a special sort that even when he is recognized he is considered something apart and his appearance among other strips is held to be only an accident.

It is by no means an accident, for the comic strip is an exceptionally supple medium, giving play to a variety of talents, to the use of many methods, and it adapts itself to almost any theme. The enormous circulation it achieves imposes certain limitations: it cannot be too local, since it is syndicated throughout the country; it must avoid political and social questions because the same strip appears in papers of divergent editorial opinions; there is no room in it for acute racial caricature, although no group is immune from its mockery. These and other restrictions have gradually made of the comic strip a changing picture of the average American life--and by compensation it provides us with the freest American fantasy.

In a book which appeared about two years ago, _Civilization in the United States_, thirty Americans rendered account of our present state. One of them, and one only, mentioned the comic strip--Mr Harold E. Stearns--and he summed up the “intellectual” attitude perfectly by saying that _Bringing Up Father_ will repay the social historian for all the attention he gives it. I do not know in what satisfactions the social historian can be repaid. I fear that the actual fun in the comic strip is not one of them. _Bringing Up Father_, says Mr Stearns, “symbolizes better than most of us appreciate the normal relation of American men and women to cultural and intellectual values. _Its very grotesqueness and vulgarity are revealing_” (italics mine). (Query: Is it vulgar of Jiggs to prefer Dinty’s café to a Swami’s lecture? Or of Mrs Jiggs to insist on the lecture? Or of both of them to be rather free in the matter of using vases as projectiles? What, in short, is vulgar?) I am far from quarreling with Mr Stearns’ leading idea, for I am sure that a history of manners in the United States could be composed with the comic strip as its golden thread; but I think that something more than its vulgarity would be revealing.

The daily comic strip arrived in the early ’nineties--perhaps it was our contribution to that artistic age--and has gone through several phases. In 1892 or thereabouts Jimmy Swinnerton created _Little Bears and Tigers_ for the San Francisco _Examiner_; that forerunner has passed away, but Swinnerton remains, and everything he does is observed with respect by the other comic-strip artists; he has had more influence on the strip even than Wilhelm Busch, the German whose _Max und Moritz_ were undoubtedly the originals of the _Katzenjammer Kids_. The strip worked its way east, prospered by William Randolph Hearst especially in the coloured Sunday Supplement, and as a daily feature by the Chicago _Daily News_, which was, I am informed, the first to syndicate its strips and so enabled Americans to think nationally. About fifteen years ago, also in San Francisco, appeared the first work of Bud Fisher, _Mr Mutt_, soon to develop into _Mutt and Jeff_, the first of the great hits and still one of the best known of the comic strips. Fisher’s arrival on the scene corresponds to that of Irving Berlin in ragtime. He had a great talent, hit upon something which took the popular fancy, and by his energy helped to establish the comic strip as a fairly permanent idea in the American newspaper.

The files of the San Francisco _Chronicle_ will one day be searched by an enthusiast for the precise date on which Little Jeff appeared in the picture. It is generally believed that the two characters came on together, but this is not so. In the beginning Mr Mutt made his way alone; he was a race-track follower who daily went out to battle and daily fell. Clare Briggs had used the same idea in his _Piker Clerk_ for the Chicago _Tribune_. The historic meeting with Little Jeff, a sacred moment in our cultural development, occurred during the days before one of Jim Jeffries’ fights. It was as Mr Mutt passed the asylum walls that a strange creature confided to the air the notable remark that he himself was Jeffries. Mutt rescued the little gentleman and named him Jeff. In gratitude Jeff daily submits to indignities which might otherwise seem intolerable.

The development in the last twenty years has been rapid, and about two dozen good comics now exist. Historically it remains to be noted that between 1910 and 1916 nearly all the good comics were made into bad burlesque shows; in 1922 the best of them was made into a ballet with scenario and music by John Alden Carpenter, choreography by Adolph Bolm; costumes and settings after designs by George Herriman. Most of the comics have also appeared in the movies; the two things have much in common and some day a thesis for the doctorate in letters will be written to establish the relationship. The writer of that thesis will explain, I hope, why “movies” is a good word and “funnies,” as offensive little children name the comic pages, is what charming essayists call an atrocious vocable.

Setting apart the strip which has fantasy--it is practised by Frueh and by Herriman--the most interesting form is that which deals satirically with every-day life; the least entertaining is the one which takes over the sentimental magazine love-story and carries it through endless episodes. The degree of interest points to one of the virtues of the comic strip: it is a great corrective to magazine-cover prettiness. Only one or two frankly pretty-girl strips exist. _Petey_ is the only one which owes its popularity to the high, handsome face and the lovely flanks of its heroine, and even there the pompous awkwardness of the persistent lover has a touch of wilful absurdity. Mrs Trubble, a second-rate strip unworthy of its originator, is simply a series of pictures dramatizing the vampire home-breaker; I am not even sure she is intended to be pretty. When nearly everything else in the same newspapers is given over to sentimentality and affected girl-worship, to advice to the lovelorn and pretty-prettiness, it is notable that the comic strip remains grotesque and harsh and careless. It is largely concerned with the affairs of men and children, and, as far as I know, there has never been an effective strip made by, for, or of a woman. The strip has been from the start a satirist of manners; remembering that it arrived at the same time as the Chicago World’s Fair, recalling the clothes, table manners, and conversation of those days, it is easy to see how the murmured satiric commentary of the strip undermined our self-sufficiency, pricked our conceit, and corrected our _gaucherie_. To-day the world of Tad, peopled with cake-eaters and finale-hoppers, the world of the _Gumps_ and _Gasoline Alley_, of _Abie the Agent_ and _Mr and Mrs_ serve the same purpose. I am convinced that none of our realists in fiction come so close to the facts of the average man, none of our satirists are so gentle and so effective. Of course they are all more serious and more conscious of their mission; but--well, exactly who cares?

The best of the realists is Clare Briggs, who is an elusive creator, one who seems at times to feel the medium of the strip not exactly suited to him, and at others to find himself at home in it. His single pictures: _The Days of Real Sport_ and _When a Feller Needs a Friend_, and the now rapidly disappearing _Kelly Pool_ which was technically a strip, are notable recreations of simple life. Few of them are actively funny; some are sentimental. The children of _The Days of Real Sport_ have an astonishing reality--and none are more real than the virtually unseen Skinnay, who is always being urged to “come over.” They are a gallery of country types, some of them borrowed from literature--the Huck Finn touch is visible--but all of them freshly observed and dryly recorded. Briggs’ line is distinctive; one could identify any square inch of his drawings. In _Kelly Pool_ he worked close to Tad’s _Indoor Sports_, and did what Tad hasn’t done--created a character, the negro waiter George whom I shall be sorry to lose. George’s amateur interest in pool was continually being submerged in his professional interest: gettings tips, and his “Bad day ... ba-a-ad day” when tips were low is a little classic. Deserting that scene, Briggs has made a successful comedy of domestic life in _Mr and Mrs_. No one has come so near to the subject--the grumbling, helpless, assertive, modest, self-satisfied, self-deprecating male, in his contacts with his sensible, occasionally irritable, wife. As often as not these episodes end in quarrels--in utter blackness with harsh bedroom voices continuing a day’s exacerbations; again the reconciliations are mushy, again they are genuine sentiment. And around them plays the child whose one function is to say “Papa loves mamma” at the most appropriate time. It is quite an achievement, for Briggs has made the ungrateful material interesting, and I can recall not one of these strips in which he has cracked a joke. Tad here follows Briggs, respectfully. _For Better or Worse_ is considerably more obvious, but it has Tad’s special value, in sharpness of caricature. The surrounding types are brilliantly drawn; only the central characters remain stock figures. Yet the touch of romance in Tad, continually overlaid by his sense of the ridiculous, is precious; he seems aware of the faint aspirations of his characters and recognizes the _rôles_ which they think they are playing while he mercilessly shows up their actuality. The finest of the _Indoor Sports_ are those in which two subordinate characters riddle with sarcasm the pretentions of the others--the clerk pretending to be at ease when the boss brings his son into the office, the lady of the house talking about the new motor car, the small-town braggart and the city swell--characters out of melodrama, some, and others so vividly taken from life that the very names Tad gives them pass into common speech. He is an inveterate creator and manipulator of slang; whatever phrase he makes or picks up has its vogue for months and his own variations are delightful. Slang is a part of their picture, and he and Walter Hoban are the only masters of it.

Ketten’s _Day of Rest_ is another strip of this _genre_, interesting chiefly as a piece of draughtsmanship. He is the most economical of the comic-strip artists, and his flat characters, without contours or body, have a sort of jack-in-the-box energy and a sardonic obstinacy. The Chicago School I have frankly never been able to understand--a parochialism on my part, or a tribute to its exceptional privacy and sophistication. It pretends, of course, to be simple, but the fate of every metropolis is to enter its small-town period at one time or another, to call itself a village, to build a town hall and sink a town pump with a silver handle. The Gumps are common people and the residents of Gasoline Alley are just folks, but I have never been able to understand what they are doing; I suspect they do nothing. It seems to me I read columns of conversation daily, and have to continue to the next day to follow the story. The campaign of Andy Gump for election to the Senate gave a little body to the serial story--he was so abysmally the ignorant Congressman that he began to live. But apart from this, apart from the despairing cry of “Oh, Min,” one recalls nothing of the Chicago School except the amusing vocabulary of Syd Smith and that Andy has no chin. It is an excellent symbol; but it isn’t enough for daily food.

The small-town school of comic strip flourishes in the work of Briggs, already mentioned, in Webster’s swift sketches of a similar nature, and in Tom MacNamara’s _Us Boys_. The last of these is an exceptional fake as small-town, but an amusing and genuine strip. It is people by creation of fancy--the alarmingly fat, amiable Skinny, the truculent Eaglebeak Spruder, the little high-brow Van with his innocence and his spectacles, and Emily, if I recall the name, the village vampire at the age of seven. Little happens in _Us Boys_, but MacNamara has managed to convey a genuine emotion in tracing the complicated relations between his personages--there is actual childhood friendship, actual worry and pride and anger--all rather gently rendered, and with a recognizable language.

It is interesting to note that none of these strips make use of the projectile or the blow as a regular _dénoûement_. I have nothing against the solution by violence of delicate problems, but since the comic strip is supposed to be exclusively devoted to physical exploits I think it is well to remark how placid life is in at least one significant branch of the art. In effect all the themes of the comic strip are subjected to a great variety of treatments, and in each of them you will find, on occasions, the illustrated joke. This is the weakest of the strips, and, as if aware of its weakness, its creators give it the snap ending of a blow, or, failing that, show us one character in consternation at the brilliance of the other’s wit, flying out of the picture with the cry of “Zowie,” indicating his surcharge of emotion. This is not the same thing as the wilful violence of _Mutt and Jeff_, where the attack is due to the malice or stupidity of one character, the resentment or revenge of the other.