Alice.. [As she faces them.] I beg your pardon. Well, that was in seventeen hundred and something. And we skip the eighteen hundreds because they were so busy: too busy to play, except just riotously, and we skip to-day, too, because ... well, really because what we showed you about to-day with bits of "you" put in it might seem rather rude. And we skip to-morrow, because to-morrow really is too serious to make our sort of jokes about. So we go right on to the day after. And you've noticed, haven't you, that we go westward all the time? So next the scene's in America, which you get to through New York. Things have been going from bad to worse with our four poor gods, but what has principally knocked them endways is machinery. Now America is full of machinery. And they can't understand it. For whatever a machine is supposed to do in the end, there's one thing it always seems sure to do in the beginning, if you're not very, very careful. And that is to knock the spirit out of a man. Which is his magic. Clown and Pantaloon and Harlequin and Columbine are very simple folk, you know. They let themselves be just what it's most natural to be, and only try to give their friends in front ... kind friends in front, they call them ... just what will make them happiest quickest. So this is what they've come to be by this time, Clown and Columbine, Harlequin and Pantaloon. No names but those, no meaning, no real part at all in the rattle and clatter of machinery which is now called Life. They're out of it. They clung to the skirts of the theatre for a bit. But the theatre, aching to be "in it", flung them off. The intellectual drama had no use for them, no use at all. And so they found themselves (out of it indeed) busking on the pavement, doing tricks and tumbling and singing silly songs to the unresponsive profiles of long lines of ladies (high-nosed or stumpy-nosed ladies), waiting admittance to the matinées of some highly intellectual play. And with glasses on those noses they'd be reading while they waited the book of that same play: so even then our poor gods busked in vain. But worse, far worse....
Along came the Man of the World again. He calls himself the Man of Business now. "Do the Public really want this sort of stuff?" he said. "Well, let 'em have it. But as a Business Proposition, if you please."
So he bought up all the theatres, and he said he'd make them pay. And his cousin, the Man in the Street, took shares. And they organised the Theatre. And they made it efficient. And they conducted it on sound commercial lines. And the magic vanished and people wondered where and why. Now what we're going to show you, you won't believe could ever happen at all. It does seem like the cheapest of cheap jokes. But really if we will think magic's to be bought and sold, and if we leave our gods to starve because there isn't any money in their laughter or their tears ... well, it's more than the Theatre that may suffer. But the poor pampered Theatre is our business now, and here's our cheap, cheap joke about it. You aren't expected to laugh ... in fact, perhaps you shouldn't. It's one of those jokes you smile at, crookedly you know, this joke of the Theatre as it well may be the day after to-morrow if some of us don't look out.
[And with that we hear music. It's a ragtime tune, and something about it hurts us. After ten bars we find out what and why. It is the theme of the gods cheapened and degraded. Music is of all the arts the directest epitome of life. Not a noble thing in it that cannot, it would seem, with just a turn or two, be turned to baseness.
Alice and Uncle Edward draw back the curtains, and there's another curtain to be seen. It is not beautiful to look at--but it's useful. It has six advertisements painted on it in "screaming" colour. "Eat and keep thin" says one. "Drink and keep sober" says the next, and Somebody's Patent Something is the way. "Indulge freely; we take the consequence", the motto runs beneath the two. "Patent pearls that will deceive an oyster" says the third. The fourth's a Face Cream, and the fifth's for Shattered Nerves. The sixth says, "Believe in our Patent God and you shall assuredly be saved." From one side comes the Man of the World--Man of Business-- Business Manager. Silk hat, dress coat, white waistcoat, shiny shirt, patent boots, and big cigar; he's very smart and prosperous indeed. From the other side come the four poor gods, out of work buskers of the streets, down at heel and weary. But still gods, and with a god-like snap of ill-temper to them for you to know them by.
Clown.. Morning.
Man of the World.. Afternoon.
Clown.. Is it? Now [Says he to the others], you leave it to me, and let's all keep our tempers. See here, Mr. Man, is this the old 99th Street Theayter?
Man of the World.. This, sir, and you know it as well as I do, is nothing so out of date. It is Number 2613 of the five thousand Attraction Houses controlled by the Hustle Trust Circuit of Automatic Drama: President, Mr. Theodor B. Kedger. But it is located on 99th Street, New York City.
Clown.. Are you the boss?