Our Stage and Its Critics / By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

by Edward Fordham Spence

The knock, knock, was decidedly impressive, like the knocking at the door in Macbeth, which greatly affected Charles Lamb. Is this matter too horrible for the stage? One may compare it with another horror given not long ago, The Soothing System, which Mr Bourchier adapted cleverly from a story by Edgar Poe and produced at the Garrick, showing the terrible adventures of two visitors to a lunatic asylum, the inmates of which had overpowered their keepers. This was very powerful and horrible, and perhaps would have given a shiver to the hero of a famous tale in the collection of goblin stories by the Brothers Grimm.

Nevertheless it was not legitimate, partly because the circumstances are rare when it is permissible to present madness on the stage, partly because some of the mad people were repulsive to the eye, and partly because horror was the sole means and end of the piece. Many condemned The Monkey's Paw, yet a line can be drawn between it and The Soothing System—not a nice sharp line, but one of those blurred lines so faint and so uncertain, that even if their existence be admitted, there is always room for a fight on the question whether a work lies on this or that side of it.

Speaking roughly, one may say that The Monkey's Paw is legitimate because there is nothing in it repulsive to the eye, and for the reason that horror is not the sole means and end of it: the story, like its prototype folk-lore tale, "The Three Wishes," has an obvious moral. It belongs to art because the emotion caused is due to a stimulus to our imagination by the force of an idea and not of a thing exhibited. If an effort were made to show us any ghastly creature knocking, the work would be out of court.

To illustrate the line of definition already indicated, a few instances of the horrible presented on the stage in our time may be given usefully; it must be added that most appear to lie on the wrong side.

Shakespeare's adventures in the horrible are legitimate, with an exception in the case of one play of doubtful authenticity, Titus Andronicus. On the other hand, Sweeney Todd; or, The Barber of Fleet Street, would probably find no defender; whilst a historical drama I once saw in the South of France, where the hero was put upon the rack in front of the footlights and squirmed and screamed, was quite unendurable; and this is rather a pity, since there is a very powerful dramatic scene in Balzac's Notes sur Catherine de Medicis, which in consequence of this objection should not be used. There is a mitigated form of the torture business in La Tosca that caused great discussion. Perhaps those who deem it illegitimate are somewhat supersensitive; it would be more polite, and perhaps accurate, to call them hyper-modern.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde presented a very difficult case. I can remember nothing so "creepy" and "shuddery" as the first appearance of Mr Mansfield at the Lyceum in the character of the evil doctor; the house gasped at the half-seen image of a sort of obscene beast at the conservatory window, and there was the silence of breathless horror when it bounded into the room and seized its victim. Until the impression wore off the Mansfield Hyde was almost as horrible as the fantastic things born of the cruel imagination and brilliant pencil of Mr S.H. Sime, whose work is sometimes so richly embellished by imagination as well as by superb technique that one cannot deny its claim to be regarded as art.

Something of the distinction here discussed can be seen by comparing Mr Sime's drawings with the pictures of the mad painter Wirtz, whose abominable gallery at Brussels is a chamber of unimaginative horrors. It may be remembered that Mr Mansfield had a competitor in Mr Bandman Palmer, who, however, missed horror by the simple vulgarity of his horrors, and, though he may have impressed the simple-minded, was ludicrous to the thoughtful.

Returning for a moment to the clearly unpermissible, one might take a book like "Frankenstein." Certainly any presentation on the stage of the man-monster as described by the talented authoress would fall under the censure of being disgusting. This term may be used concerning several needless exhibitions of blood on the stage, and of such a matter as Nana, once presented in Paris. When the hapless heroine appeared in the last act with wax spots to indicate the pustules of smallpox, she very nearly "took a lot out of us," if one may borrow a phrase from "Mr Hopkinson." Obviously anything that reminds one of the ghastly horrors at the Royal College of Surgeons or the Polyclinic Institute is quite unforgivable.

This brings us not unnaturally to a matter in which there has been some change of taste. A fearful exhibition of a man in a fit, given with horrible power by that admirable actor Mr Pateman in a melodrama called Master and Man, would perhaps not be condemned in our days, but probably we would not endure, and certainly there would be little praise for, some of the death scenes once famous in drama. The critics nowadays would apply to the actress the phrase of the auctioneer to his wife, and implore her to "get on with her dying."

There was the famous Mlle. Croizette in Le Sphinx, by that detestable dramatist Octave Feuillet; she squirmed horribly after taking poison from a ring; and it was alleged that she had studied the death of patients in hospitals—a brutal, horrible thing to do. There is a good deal too much dying in Frou-Frou, La Dame aux Camellias and Adrienne Lecouvrer. Without going back to the traditions of the Greek theatre, one may say confidently that, if death on the stage is permissible, dying is almost illegitimate, and trick falls, exhibitions of agony, and the like are mere pandering to a very vulgar taste. Occasionally the dying is so handled that, though somewhat prolonged, such a vigorous phrase ought not to be applied to it. For instance, one may refer to In the Hospital, once presented at the Court, where Mr Beveridge, in an admirable performance, gave a very tactful, restrained exhibition of approaching death and actual decease. Another objection exists to any exhibition upon the stage of dying as compared with death. The symptoms often call up terrible memories to some members of the audience which are not evoked by the simple fact of death itself. It cannot be pretended that these references to instances of the horrible and the trifling comments upon them establish the existence of the distinction indicated, but they may be of some assistance to those who endeavour to explore the matter. It is at least pleasant to note that there is a modern tendency to obtain effects of the horrible by appeals to the imagination rather than to the senses.