THE MORALITY OF OUR DRAMA
[Mr Harry Lauder on the Morals of our Drama ]
A little while ago Mr Harry Lauder made some statements to a representative of The Daily Chronicle concerning the relations between music-halls and theatres. Some readers may be aware that Mr Harry Lauder is a popular music-hall singer, and by many people regarded as the chief of his calling. Consequently his utterances have a little importance.
According to Mr Lauder a gulf exists between the theatres and the music-halls, and it is due to the fact that the playhouses traffic in immorality and the halls are pure. The variety theatres shudder at the thought of presenting plays that introduce people who are or have been unduly intimate without marriage. Let us use the words of the stern moralist: "Now, take certain plays produced in certain theatres. The curtain rises, and you ask yourself the question, 'Will they marry?'" The attitude reminds one a little of the dear ladies at the seaside who use prism field-glasses in order to be sure whether the costumes of the bathers are really indecent. "Sometimes you think, 'Are they married?' In that play there is throughout a suggestiveness which would not be allowed in a music-hall."
Ye gods and little Lauder, how beautiful and simple is the morality of the music-hall! "Be married and you will be virtuous" seems to sum it up. From the Lauder point of view there are no difficult questions of morality; there are sheep and there are goats, but no hybrids, and we ought never to refer to the goats in public. There are no problem plays, for there are no problems; everything is plain and easy. Intimate relations between people not married to one another are beyond discussion, and it is vulgar to present such law-breakers upon the stage.
The great Lauder attacks Mr Barrie; he complains of What Every Woman Knows. It has one fault, for "there is a touch of immorality in it which does not exist, as he must know, in the true character of a Scotsman. The man going away with another woman is the only part of the play which I did not like; and it was quite unnecessary. Jimmy Barrie is a far cleverer man than he thinks he is, but I am sorry for this piece." Poor Mr Barrie, the great Lauder is sorry for you. Still, it must be some comfort for you to know that the great illustrious immortal Lauder calls you "Jimmy."
Let us dig a little deeper into the gold-mine. It is very touching to see the confidence of Mr Lauder in the virtue of his fellow-countrymen. According to him, "no touch of immorality exists in the true character of a Scotsman." Yet it is said that the streets of bonnie Glasgow and other great towns of virtuous Scotland are not free from the presence of the hapless followers of Rahab, but perhaps they are only there for the entertainment of English visitors.
According to the last edition of Chambers's Encyclopaedia, the proportion of illegitimate births in Scotland to legitimate is nearly twice the proportion in England, and almost three times as great as that in Ireland. No doubt this, again, is due to the foul Saxon. It is wonderful that the Scots do not prevent us from coming into their virtuous country. Yet an idea comes to mind—uncharitable, no doubt. Some people have thought it an ugly touch in Mr Barrie's play when one of Maggie's brothers hissed the term of reproach "Englishman" to John Shand on discovering his faithlessness to his wife. It seemed a brutal charge of Pharisaism to the minds of us benighted Southerners. Was the author making an anticipatory hit at Mr Lauder?
Somewhat later in the interview are these words: "Now, when you go to the theatre you get the good and the bad characters, and I contend that there is no necessity to show the bad." Alas! poor Shakespeare, Lauder obliterates you with a sentence, and under his severe censure your warmest admirers should try to save your reputation by accepting the view that Bacon wrote the plays—and the poems as well. It would be thrilling to have a drama in which all the characters were good, but how would the dramatists construct their plots without the use of a villain?
However, to be just to Mr Lauder, by badness of character he means lack of reverence for chastity. It is a curious point of view that involves the banishment from the stage of all questions concerning right and wrong in the traffic between man and woman, which condemns What Every Woman Knows as immoral. People used to think that the music-hall stage might be a kind of feeding-ground for drama, might breed playgoers capable of taking the view that drama has other functions than merely that of amusing; but, if the illustrious Lauder is correct, the music-halls stand aloof. Even the ladies of the promenade would be shocked by The Second Mrs Tanqueray, fly blushingly from The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, and put ashes on their dyed hair if Iris were offered to them. What a topsy-turvydom the entertainment world seems when a popular star ventures to censure in a great daily paper the modern drama of the country and takes himself quite seriously in urging the superiority of the music-halls in taste and morality to the theatres!
Mr Lauder, in addition to his curious ideas about drama from a moral point of view, seems to have strange opinions concerning the nature of plays. He says: "Moreover, in a theatre only one or two stars appear, and they appear only now and again; otherwise they would not shine! If they were always on the stage there would be a sameness in the performance. And the other members of the company are only playing up to these stars, giving so much padding to the entertainment. Little wonder that the public is not satisfied with the play of to-day." If we understand this correctly, and we have honestly tried to do so, it involves a complete misunderstanding as to the nature of drama, and means that Mr Lauder thinks that its whole purpose is to provide star acting parts, and that, since plays cannot be written in which all the characters are star parts, drama is a poor sort of stuff of no great interest. In his calling, of course, all are stars, though, perhaps, he would hardly admit that all are of equal brilliance; and one fancies that he regards as inacceptable any entertainment during which part of the stage is occupied by persons receiving no greater salary than that of a county court judge.
Of course, every man is entitled to his own point of view, and if Mr Lauder considers that his turns are preferable to drama, he is quite right to say so. There are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of persons to whom his performances represent the summit of art; they, of course, are entitled to their opinions.
There is no reason for supposing that his remarks are not uttered in good faith. Indeed, it is their obviously complacent sincerity which renders them so exquisitely comic. If he were half as funny on the stage as he is in cold print, the whole world would be at his feet. From one point of view his utterances are quite unimportant: to the world outside the music-hall they only represent the unintentional humours of a man without weight, save in his branch of his calling; but, so far as they are the opinions of the variety stage, the matter is serious, since it suggests that the modern drama has an enemy, not a friend, in the music-halls, and an enemy which works under such unfair conditions of advantage and is so powerfully organised that it may become the duty of the theatre to wage a fierce war upon it.
No great change would be needed in the conduct of the playhouses in London to enable them to cut into the music-halls. The sympathy with the music-halls of those who have been advocating free trade in drama may become exhausted, and, on the other hand, a system may be devised under which the theatres take music-hall licences, and then the inflated salaries which have led to swollen heads will soon shrink.
[Double Entente ]
The correspondence provoked concerning Mr Harry Lauder and his views about the drama and the music-halls was a little disappointing owing to its onesidedness. The music-hall performer in one respect resembled St Athanasius. A passage in a letter on the topic was surprising. Miss Violet Vanbrugh said: "The English language, too, is so difficult; it leaves so little to the imagination. It seems to come down definitely, in a fearfully flat-footed fashion. The French dramatist finds his task made easy, as his language can suggest simply without definitely stating, more easily than can be done in English."
This opinion is surprising. It would be amazing if it were correct, seeing the enormous wealth of our language in words and forms of expression, and the fact that for the best part of a century our dramatists lived chiefly on "hints," upon suggesting more than they durst say. The very word "hint" is significant. We use it frequently; who can find a word in the French language that exactly represents it? One may add that we have English equivalents for most, perhaps all, of the French phrases that have to serve for our handy word "hint." When one recollects the hundreds of adaptations of more or less indelicate or indecent French plays seen on our boards, the idea that it is difficult for the English expert to say nasty things nicely seems absurd. Our journalists have used more often the incorrect phrase double entendre than the French critics the phrase double entente, which is the term that our writers intend to employ.
Were it otherwise, one would be amazed. The French always have been, and still are, very candid in the use of language; whilst we for a long time past have been prudish to an extent sometimes comic. Readers of Laurence Sterne can hardly deny that the English tongue enables one to be indelicate in idea whilst decent in expression, and it is noteworthy that this writer, so often censured for the immodest salt of his wit, is one of those who comment with surprise upon the simple frankness of the French of his time. There is an episode in "Tristram Shandy," or "The Sentimental Journey" concerning a lady, the author and a carriage drive, which shows this very well; but the printers would strike if asked to set it up in these chaste pages.
Our own native prudery, enriched by a quantity imported from the United States, has led to an immense hypocrisy of language, and consequently to an extraordinary facility in hinting unseemly ideas which on the French stage would be expressed bluntly. It is true that, so far as love is concerned, the French have invented a funny little language of prudery for the benefit of schoolgirls, and countless books have been printed, and received the benediction of Monseigneur l'Archevêque de Tours, in which the word tambour is printed instead of the word amour, and so on. By-the-by, it is rather quaint that the Archbishop of Tours should be chosen as godfather of these superchaste books, seeing that Touraine has a rather famous reputation for naughty stories, and Balzac alleges that his naughty "Contes Drolatiques" are "Colliges ez Abbayes de Touraine." It would be remarkable if the French tongue lent itself as easily as ours to the double entente.
We have a far larger vocabulary available and in common use, and we possess slang not only of the different nations constituting the United Kingdom, but also slang from the United States, and from our Colonies, whilst we have a lawlessness in the use of our language not permitted to the French. There are disadvantages as well as advantages from this, for as a result our tongue is abominably rich in ambiguities, and it is a common observation that French scientific works are clearer than ours, not only because the nation is more logical, but also on account of the fact that the language is more precise. Some people, no doubt, fancy that the French dramatists are conveying indelicate ideas delicately, because they do not exactly understand what is being said or sung. Remarks have been made about the subtlety of French after speeches and songs which, if literally translated, would have cleared the house. "Ne rien comprendre c'est tout gober" is a convenient twist of language. Did not Yvette Guilbert sing publicly in London the song with the refrain "Hors du mariage" ... we must stop there.
Our stage has suffered because our dramatists have been able to get much of the indelicate fun out of French farces by using, hypocritically, decent phrases which all parties understand in a bad sense whilst pretending to see nothing shocking in them; for without this elasticity of our tongue British playwrights would have been thrown upon their own resources. Nowadays our playwrights have to some extent abandoned their subservience to France, and it is noticeable that those who take their work seriously, and deal with the difficult questions of life sincerely, are showing a tendency to abandon the language of suggestion, to give up hinting, and to avoid the double entente. The result is that many prudes are shocked, and people who have no real objection to certain subjects or ideas denounce plays embodying them because this hypocrisy of language has been abandoned.
The Censor, of course, is one obstacle to plain speaking. He and his office are the superb representatives of English cant, hypocrisy and prudery, and one advantage that must follow from the abolition, if it comes, will be the ousting of the comedy of indecent suggestion by the drama of honest candour. He possesses his little vocabulary in which tambour passes for amour, and in fact his office has been worked on the ostrich head-in-the-sand system for many years past. The chief duty of the official has been to prevent people from calling a spade a spade, and most, though not all, of the pieces banned would have obtained a licence if in place of straightforward phrase the author had employed some hypocritical, prudish suggestion.
Who doubts that a licensed English version of Monna Vanna could have been prepared, although fully giving to the audience the meaning of the awful line, "Nue sous son manteau"? One may doubt the comic story that Mr Redford mistook the sous for sans. The motto for the office, if it has a crest, should be the famous line from a music-hall song: "It ain't exac'ly wot 'e sez, it's the narsty way 'e sez it."
No wonder foreigners are puzzled by our theatre. The Parisian sees a Palais Royal farce played before an audience of which many members are girls in the bread-and-butter stage. In his great city maidens are—or, at least, were—not allowed to enter the theatre so long famous for its naughty farces. He gasps; he wonders whether the English mees is as innocent as she looks—or used to look—and does not know the perfide tongue of the perfide Albion well enough to be aware that nothing shocking is said, and that it is pretended that the cocotte is a mere kindly friend, the collage a trifling flirtation, the debauche a viceless lark, and that the foulest conduct of husband or wife does not reach a real breach of the commandment more often broken in England than the rest of the sacred ten.
The real sin of the Censor's office lies as much in what it permits as in what it forbids; and a growing sense of decency in the public is displacing prudery so that the abolition of the office will not cause the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the indelicacy of his own thoughts.
[Moral Effect on Audience ]
There was quite a pretty hubbub in theatredom caused by a circular letter of "The Church Pastoral Aid Society," calling upon incumbents and curates to regard theatrical performances as "a serious menace to the spiritual influence of the Church," and suggesting that in future they should refuse to take money raised by means of theatrical performances, or by bazaars or whist-drives or dances. Of course, all people connected with the theatres were very indignant at the insult implied; whilst, on the other hand, many parsons and Nonconformist ministers rushed into print and said very unflattering things about the stage.
The matter certainly had considerable public importance, and deserved to be considered in cold blood; and one may well raise, and attempt to answer, the plain question whether the Church is right or wrong in adopting an attitude of hostility towards the stage. The question of gratitude has been put forward, but is not really relevant: no doubt players and managers in the past have been very liberal with their services for charitable purposes, including matters specifically connected with churches, and although very often the actual motive of the liberality has been the desire for advertisement and notoriety—and the desire is natural and blameless—yet it is fair to assume that in many instances the real motive has been truly charitable. It is, however, obvious that a person might steal with the object of giving the money to a church restoration fund, and clearly his intention would not excuse his act nor enable the Church to endorse it. The plain question is whether the stage "makes for righteousness."
Into the very thorny question raised some years ago by Clement Scott with disastrous consequences to himself as to whether the stage is demoralizing to the actors and actresses we do not now propose to venture. Much has been said and written on the topic, but it is largely one of fact, which demands the examination of a great deal of evidence. For the moment, then, let us merely discuss the question whether the effect of the stage on the audience is good or bad: in many cases there is no appreciable effect at all, and they may be eliminated.
Now, it must be admitted by all, save the extreme Puritans, that not only are there a great number of harmless pieces, but also many entirely moral in scope and aim, and likely to produce some good effect upon playgoers; but there are others. No doubt the famous George Barnwell has gone out of date, and the Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard plays, which did a great deal of harm, are not presented often in our days. Nevertheless there are so many pieces still produced which in one way or another are injurious to playgoers as to render it fairly arguable that the effect of the stage as a whole is bad.
So long as religion enjoins the virtue of chastity, its professors must look with hostility upon the very numerous pieces in which women, young and beautiful, are presented in dresses radically immodest. It seems impossible to deny that the sexual instincts of young men are often provoked to an extreme degree by the sight upon the stage of beautiful, half-nude young women; and it must be remembered that the spectacle is frequently accompanied by music of an erotic character. There is not the least doubt that the lighter musico-dramatic works and the pantomimes, in consequence of these matters, are the direct and immediate cause of many acts which religious people regard as acts of sexual immorality. The degree of nudity, of display of the human form in our theatres, and, of course, music-halls as well, to those unaccustomed to such matters is certainly quite startling, and by many people such displays are regarded as being entirely demoralizing to hot-blooded young men. It is, therefore, not surprising that there are religious people who have no objection to innocent amusements or to drama as drama, yet regard the theatre as causing a great deal of immorality in the way already indicated.
The Censor, not the present occupant of the post, at one time interfered and dealt with the question of costume at the Lyceum in the pre-Irving days, but his efforts were a failure, and, as far as is publicly known, have not been renewed since. Lately the degree of nudity considered permissible has been largely increased. The Salome dancers built a bridge of beads across what was regarded as a fixed gulf: it is difficult for stern moralists to stomach the danse du ventre.
The next aspect of the matter is that the tendency of the stage, broadly speaking, is to preach a kind of conventional morality somewhat below the standard considered admissible by serious people; one may go further, and say that plays have been produced, particularly French plays, such as the clever works of M. Capus, in which the accepted ideas of the sanctity of marriage are treated with contempt. Some works of this character have been translated and played at first-class theatres, and in popular dramas of the Zaza and Sapho type we were invited to grieve over the disappointments in lawless love of women quite shameless in character.
For years past a large proportion of plays have concerned themselves with the question of the seventh commandment; and whilst, as a rule, in order to dodge the Censor, it is pretended that no actual breach has occurred, the audience know that this is merely a pretence. In a large number of these plays the question of adultery is handled so facetiously as to tend to cause people to regard it as a trivial matter; whilst in numbers of the others, where the matter is handled more seriously, the actual consequences of sin are of such little inconvenience to the sinners that, although theoretically the plays preach a moral, the actual lesson is of no weight at all.
A curious aspect of the matter is that theatredom, as appears from the bulk of the evidence before the Censorship Commission, is opposed to the class of play in which the proposition is preached that "the wages of sin is death." Plays like Ghosts and A Doll's House—as far as the episode of Nora's hopeless lover is concerned—and the works of that fierce moralist M. Brieux are banned by most of official theatredom, and some of them are censored. In fact, the whole note of the theatre is that gloomy or painful matters should be excluded. It is not too much to say that the theatre insists strongly upon being regarded simply as a place of entertainment, and objects almost savagely to dramas which really show sin as ugly and vice as harmful, both to the vicious and innocent; it refuses to be a moralizing institution, and those who seek to justify such an attitude do so by claiming that it is a branch of art and not morals.
No doubt there are exceptions. We have had Everyman upon the stage, and The Passing of the Third Floor Back, in which the highest morality is preached, and in The Fires of Fate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a sincere effort to use the stage for noble purposes; nor would it be difficult to multiply instances. Moreover, it may be claimed that the dramas of Shakespeare, on the whole, have a high standard of morality which might satisfy the Church, and they play a considerable part on our modern stage; yet, speaking with a really substantial knowledge of the subject, one may say confidently that, despite much that is good and admirable, the balance is seriously to the bad. Our theatre does a little good and a great deal of harm.
It is possible that views such as these may be in the minds of those who wrote the circular of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, and if so they were justified in writing. If, on the other hand, they were merely actuated by the Puritanic idea that drama and the theatre are necessarily immoral, we strongly dissent, for the drama might be made a very powerful influence for good, and this renders the more regrettable the fact that, although in some respects there is a little advance towards the good, it is very slow, and it is doubtful whether the balance will be turned in our time. There is a greater advance in art than in morality as far as the theatre is concerned, but even in art the progress is very disappointing.
[An Advantage of French Dramatists ]
There are many people who entertain the idea that modern French drama is better than modern English drama; and from this it seems a natural deduction that the French playwrights of to-day are abler than their contemporary English dramatists. A study of the large collection of French plays produced at the New Royalty Theatre by M. Gaston Mayer, as well as those presented under other managements during the last few years, and some knowledge of those which have not crossed the unamiable Channel, causes me to wonder. The careless may make the mistake of comparing the imported French pieces with the average English plays; this, of course, is absurd, since only the successful foreign works are played over here; consequently, for purposes of fair comparison, one must eliminate not only our failures but our plays of average merit. Even after the process of elimination has been made there lurks the danger of error, for when comparing the efforts of our playwrights with those of Paris one is making a comparison between men working under a heavy handicap and men unburdened by it. There is a whole world, or at least a whole half-world, open freely to the French writer into which the English dramatist is only permitted to crawl furtively. A large proportion of the foreign works in question, if faithfully translated and presented in London, would cause a howl of horror, based on the proposition that some of them are immoral and some are indelicate, and many both.
No sane people pretend to agree with the observation of some celebrated person, to the effect that anybody can be witty who is willing to be indecent; it is not more universally true than the proposition that no one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. Nevertheless there is something in it. Many real witticisms are indecent; some profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be indecent or immoral.
Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of subjects and ideas open to his competitor. In other words, the Englishman's stock may be regarded as x, and the Frenchman's as x + y, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local humour on the other.
Now y, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown tired of x, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine themselves to this far from unknown quantity. Thackeray is said to have regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round a little track of conventional morality.
It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles—but they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas fils were sincere moralists according to their points of view, though the methods of their moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family—an idea deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country.
On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their ideas of social and family life and their view of the sanctity of true marriage they were forced to exhibit the perils caused by lawless passion, and frequently their works, as in such extreme instances as Le Mariage d'Olympe and La Femme de Claude, which has the memorable preface with the Tue la phrase, deal candidly with very ugly matters.
Their successors, putting aside such men as Brieux and Hervieu—whose intentions are strictly honourable—may pretend to be moralists, but they adopt an impudently unconventional attitude. They seem to modify the phrase that "property is theft" into the proposition that "marriage is a selfish monopoly." We have had play after play apparently based upon a merely sensual idea of free love. Like their predecessors they handle mud, and they handle it as Walton bade the angler handle the frog when using it as bait. Some of them seem to have no prejudice in favour of people who try to exercise decent self-restraint. Without pleading their cause, one must point out that in the domain of lawless passion there are hundreds of thrilling or vastly comic situations at the command of the dramatist, whether he be moralist or simply boulevardier. No wonder then that there seem to be far more original plays in France than in England.
The advantage of the foreigners is even greater in the matter of dialogue than subject. With the aid of tact and certain elaborate conventions the English dramatist is able to handle many of his competitor's themes and has contrived to adapt some of his forward, if hardly advanced, plays and by ridiculous changes decidedly emasculating them, has succeeded in presenting a sort of version of a number of the saucy farces. The dialogue baffles him.
It cannot be denied that a great deal of the dialogue of French plays is very funny, rather shocking, and not exactly gross. As a rule the more distinguished writers avoid the tone of the joyeusetés of an Armand Sylvestre, a writer capable of using bluntly without acknowledgement the crudest of Chaucer's tales and also of writing beautiful poetry quite free from offence; but even when the humbler gauloiseries are neglected the finer indelicacy is employed, and the men laugh and ladies pretend to put up their fans. Nobody, perhaps, is at all worse, for the jeune fille is only taken to carefully selected plays, except at the seaside, where in the casino she attends performances of works that in Paris she would not be allowed to see; and, moreover, there is truth in what a French manager once shrewdly observed—"Those who can't understand the jokes won't be hurt, and those who can, can't."