The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,
For we that live to please must please to live.
—Samuel Johnson.
I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled ‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury Square.
But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely unappreciated and misunderstood.
Speaking of the actor and his profession, I pointed out that the only real test of merit in an actor was the judgment of the Box Office, and that therefore an actor is bound to play to a Box Office and succeed with a Box Office if he wants to continue to be an actor.
The suggestion was received with contempt and derision. No artist, I was told, no man of any character would deign to think of so low a thing as the Box Office. All the great men of the world were men who had had a contempt for the Box Office, and the Box Office is, and must in its nature be, a lowering and degrading influence. This opinion seemed so widely held that I decided to hold an inquest upon my original suggestion, and the result of this, I need hardly say, was not only to confirm me in the view that I was entirely right, but to convince me that my neighbours were sunk in the slough of a dangerous heresy, in which it was my duty to preach at them whilst they slowly disappeared in the ooze of their unpardonable error.
There is something essentially English in the very name of the institution—the Box Office. About the only thing an average Box Office cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the vox populi, which is far nearer the vox Dei than the voice of the expert witness.
Before discoursing of the Box Office in its widest sense, let us return for a moment to the case of the actor. Here the Box Office must, in the nature of things, decide his fate. It is the polling booth of the playgoer, and it is the playgoer and not the critic who decides whether an actor is great or otherwise. Why do we call Garrick a great actor? Because the Box Office of his time acclaimed him one. Davies tells us how his first performance of Richard III. was received with loud and reiterated applause. How his ‘look and actions when he pronounced the words,