Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

Which reminds me. The general playgoer just because he is general, is what Henry James called George Sand: remarkably accessible. Everybody knows him. He is a public theme. Theorists won’t leave him alone. In particular, the collective psychologists have marked him for their prey. For them he typifies the theatrical “crowd,” with the peculiar crowd characteristics these theorists profess to have scientifically classified. Sarcey began it. Lemaître followed. And comparatively obscure scribes have devoted attention to the general playgoer. They have said that he is no philosopher; he cannot adopt a detached, impersonal, disinterested view of life; he must take sides. Hence the convention of the “sympathetic personage.” He has not the judicial faculty, is not accustomed to sift evidence or to estimate probabilities. Hence the convention of the “long arm of coincidence” and the convention that the wildest improbability may be taken as the starting-point of a play. The general playgoer, as such, is virtuous and generous; for we are all on our best behaviour in public. And he insists upon a strict separation of virtue and vice. He wants his personages all of a piece. The composite characters, blends of good and evil, he refuses to recognize. Hence the conventions of “hero” and “villain,” of “poetic justice” and of “living happy ever afterwards.” Further, it has been suggested that a crowd of general playgoers, having an individuality of its own, cannot but be interested in that individuality, apart from all reference to the cause which brought it together. Once assembled, it becomes self-conscious, self-assertive. It finds itself an interesting spectacle. And the general playgoer is not of the cloistered but of the gregarious type of mankind; he must have bustle, the sense of human kinship brought home to him by sitting elbow by elbow with his neighbours. The faculty of intellectual attention is seldom high in such a temperament as this. Hence the playwright has to force the attention of a temperamentally inattentive audience. Mark, once more, that I am not speaking of first-nighters. Their individuality is too strong to be crowd-immersed. I would not for worlds speak of them as a crowd at all. They are an assemblage, a constellation, a galaxy. Admirable persons!

But there is one thing for which I envy the general playgoer above all. I mean his freedom and pungency of criticism. Anonymity gives him irresponsibility, and, his resentment at being bored not being subject to the cooling process of literary composition, his language is apt to be really terrible. Talk of printed criticism! Actors and authors do talk of it often enough, and on the whole don’t seem to like it; but let them mingle with the general playgoer and keep their ears open! Who was the man in Balzac who said that it was absurd to speak of the danger of certain books when we all had the corrupt book of the world open before us, and beyond that another book a thousand times more dangerous—all that is whispered by one man to another or discussed behind ladies’ fans at balls? So the general playgoer is the great purveyor of secret criticism. Disraeli, or another, said that the secret history of the world, which never got into the history books, was the only true history. Let us hope that secret criticism is not the only true sort, but it is certainly the most live. It is free from the literary bias, the cant of criticism, the smell of the lamp. And it is the most potent of persuasives. Published criticism is powerless against it. The fate of a play is not decided by newspaper criticisms (thank goodness! I should be miserable if it were), but by what the general playgoers say to one another and pass on to their friends. How many plays with “record” runs have been dismissed by the newspapers on the morrow of the first night with faint praise or positive dispraise? The general playgoer has said his say, and what he says “goes.” I know he is giving many worthy people just now much uneasiness. They form little theatrical societies à côté to keep him out. They deplore his taste and organize leagues for his education and improvement. I rather fancy he is like the young lady in the play who “didn’t want to have her mind improved.” But that is another story. What I have been envying him for is not his taste but the heartiness with which he “abounds in his own sense” and his freedom in expressing it. After all, perhaps criticism that is so free and so pervasive and so potent is not exactly to be called “secret.” I seek the mot juste. Or I would if that were not a back-number. Has not Mr. Beerbohm finally put it in its place as the Holy Grail of the nineties?

FIRST NIGHTS

There is a movement, I am told, in certain critical circles in favour of the system which obtains in Parisian theatres of the répétition générale. This, as most playgoers know, is a final “dress rehearsal” held on the evening (at the Français, where evening performances must be continuous, on the afternoon) of the day before the actual “first night” production, or première, of the play. The seats, including the exceptionally large number allotted in Paris to the Press, are filled by invitation. It is the real “first night”; only there is no “money” in the house. Notoriously, there is a formidable cohort of Parisians who regard their seat at a répétition générale as a kind of vested interest, and who would be affronted by having to put up with the première. A very remarkable public this is, the public of the répétition générale, with its members virtually all known to one another, filling the foyer with chatter and much scent, and patiently sitting through a performance which is apt to begin a good half-hour after the advertised time, and to end in the small hours of the morning. The inter-acts are of inordinate length, perhaps in the interests of the buffet, more likely because of the inveterate leisureliness of the Parisians. The whole thing, at any rate as I have found it, is a weariness to English flesh. But then the gentlemen (and ladies) of the Press have the advantage of being able to go home straight to bed, and of having all next day to think over their “notices.”

That is the reason, I suppose, why some critics would like to see the system introduced in London. They want more time. They want to sleep on it. They would write, they think, better in the morning. Let me leave that point, however, for the moment to turn to what an incorrigibly commercial world will probably think a more important one, the question of finance. To the theatrical manager the introduction of this system would mean the loss of a whole night’s receipts. With theatre rents and expenses at their present height, could they possibly contemplate so heavy a sacrifice? They are already complaining that theatre seats at their present prices do not pay—and here they would be giving away, for one night, the whole house. Further, however they might gratify the friends whom they invited, nothing could save them from the wrath of those who were left over. Some of these, perhaps, might be mollified by a subsequent invitation—for the “deadhead” habit becomes an insidious disease, and, I am told, the Paris theatres groan under the hordes of playgoers who consider themselves entitled to gratuitous admission. On the whole, I think our managers would be ill-advised to countenance the suggested change.

Another thing. The répétition générale is a trial performance. Effects which don’t “tell,” incidents which shock or provoke ridicule, are often cut out next morning, so that the play actually presented at the première differs, sometimes vitally, from that presented to the critics, so that the “notice” not seldom describes and criticizes various matters which the public are never shown. If the English manager imitated this example—and as a practical man of business he would be sure to imitate it—the unhappy critic after writing his notice would have to go to the play again, before printing it, in order to assure himself that it still represented the facts. It would have to be two bites at a cherry. Now, new plays are often produced on two nights running, in which case two bites at the same cherry would be impossible. In the most favourable case, two successive visits to a play would be a heavy addition to the burden of life.

But would criticism benefit in quality? I venture to doubt that, too. I think that theatrical “notices” are all the better for being piping hot. One’s impressions of the play are stronger, more definite in outline, richer in colour, when one leaves the theatre than next morning, when they have had time to cool and to fade into “second thoughts,” which in criticism are far from being always the best. When Jules Lemaître went from the Débats to the Deux Mondes he found that his thoughts about the play, instead of maturing with the longer interval for writing, were apt to become simply vague and general. If the play happened to be one “of ideas,” not so much harm was done, because ideas stick in the mind, and are revolved there. But a play of emotion or a play dependent on fine shades of acting is bound to suffer by the gradual waning of the first impression. And my own experience is that in writing about a play of which one has lost the first hot impression, and which one has to recall by an effort of memory, the proportions get altered, so that the criticism is thrown out of gear. Some point, a mere minor point, perhaps, that attracted one’s attention, remains in the mind and assumes an undue importance in relation to other details that have faded. I went to see Grierson’s Way revived the other night after a quarter of a century. When I asked myself beforehand what I remembered of it, I could only answer that I had been originally much struck by its merits, but that the only one of these merits that remained in my mind was a conversation wherein, under a surface of small talk, two people were revealing depths of tragic emotion. I had forgotten the characters, the motif, the very story. And when my conversation turned up (in Act III.), though I was as delighted as ever, I saw, of course, that it was only an item, not the sole memorable thing in the play.

An interval of a quarter of a century is rather different from one of four-and-twenty hours? Undoubtedly; but my point is that one’s impressions begin to wane and to alter in “values” from the very outset. After all it is the business of critics not merely to criticize, analyse, and judge a play, to try and “place” it in the realm of art; they have also the perhaps minor but still important duty of acting as public “tasters.” They have to represent facts, to give the public a reasonably accurate notion of what they are likely to see. And they are in a much better position for doing this if they set down their facts and their views of the facts at once, while they are still quivering with the excitement (or yawning with the boredom) of them.