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

by Edward Fordham Spence

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 No doubt the famous George Barnwell has gone out of date, and the Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard plays, which did a great deal of harm, are not presented often in our days.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.