When you turn to the music halls you find the American in equally sad case. There is no performer of note on the English music-hall stage whose training and experience have been American. From the other side we get a few trick bicyclists, wire-walkers, high divers, and comic speech makers whose pea-nutty witticisms are obviously culled from the comic papers. They help to fill up the programme, without in any sense helping to fill up the house.
It is in this connection that the Americans have made a practical avowal of their pathetic inferiority; for they are said to have made contracts with some of the leading English stars for appearances in America, on terms which plainly indicate that the American managers must be singularly hard up for talent and quite incapable of finding it in their own country.
The fact is, that in this as in a variety of other matters, the American’s cock-sureness and unblushing faith in his personal beauty and powers have led him considerably astray. The American really possesses scarcely any talent. All he can do is to boast and shout and advertise. And having little or nothing behind him to boast and shout and advertise about, he is bound in the long run to find himself at a disadvantage. Half the actresses and female music-hall artists of America are successful not because they can do anything, but because they have been “boosted” into fame by the pushful, blatant manager. The sole accomplishment of many of them is that they can undress prettily in full view of their audiences.
For the rest they bolster up their position by extraneous escapades rather than by art. They are harum-scarum, feather-brained young women who for the most part would find it exceedingly difficult to get a living by the exercise of their alleged smartness before an English public. And as for American actors and music-hall men, the best that can be said of them is that when they are not vulgar they are deadly dull, and the worst that their real sphere of life is the American circus. I wish they would all take to the Tank.
The average American theatrical man, invariably strikes me as being a born circus-man, intended by nature to go around in a gaudy procession by day and to fill up his nights showing off wild beasts and freaks and Deadwood coaches. Unconsciously he does all his business and manages all his affairs on circus principles. He is for ever beating the drum and inviting the crowd to walk up and see the finest show on earth. The ideal man of his private bosom is the late P. T. Barnum, who was the father of advertisement and the originator of the fine art of “boosting.” It was P. T. Barnum who said, or who got somebody to say for him, “When you have anything good, keep on letting on about it, and you will get rich.”
The American business man has always considered that saying to be the extreme height of philosophy.
