What are these two latter things? Are they plays? Is there any acting in them at all? Is there a single good thought inculcated, good feeling stirred, good end attained by their presentation? Are they fit to place before a public composed of ladies and gentlemen, of virtuous men and women, above all before the young, the pleasure-seekers, of both sexes?
To all these questions we answer an emphatic no; and we are certain that the managers who got them up would agree with us. Yet all New York—speaking generally—crowded to see them. The expense in producing them was enormous. Actresses, scenery, dresses, machinery, were purchased and brought from over the sea; and all for what? A display of brilliant costumes, or rather an absence of them; crowds of girls set in array, and posturing so as to bring out every turn and play of the limbs. Throughout it was simply a parade of indecency artistically placed upon the stage, with garish lights and intoxicating music to quicken the senses and inflame the passions. The very advertisements in the streets and in the public press set forth as their crowning attraction the crowds of “ladies” and their scanty raiment.
How women with any pretensions to modesty could sit out such an exhibition without a blush—how men could take women for whom they had any respect to witness it, are things we cannot understand. That such things can succeed at all, can succeed so well, can beat everything else from the field, among us, speaks ill for us; speaks ill for our taste, our morality, our civilization. To Protestants and Catholics alike we say: Cry down, with all the power that is in you, public exhibitions that are daily undermining and uprooting the morality of this great nation, which affects, as it must continue to affect more and more day by day, the destiny of the world. They influence the fashions; they fill the public streets with impurity. Their effect is in the very air we breathe, the press we read, the pictures that meet our eyes on every stand. To the recognition and open admiration we display for such performances on the public stage, we owe those lower dens of infamy that corrupt our youth, poison their life, and cause the whole race to degenerate; and the bloody tragedies in real life which have from their frequency almost ceased to create a sensation. They are a blot upon our institutions, a stain upon our morality, a scandal to every decent eye.
But who is to blame?
The public deplores the depravity of the taste of the age, and carries its opera-glass to the theatre so as not to miss an iota. The manager blames the actor, the actor the author, and the author the manager. Perhaps all are to blame more or less; but undoubtedly the onus of it rests with us who pay for and go to see such things. The manager whom we blame so much objects very properly: The people want to be amused, and we must find something to amuse them. Good plays that are presentable are almost as rare as good actors to interpret them, as an appreciative audience to come and admire them. If the public did not demand such sights, you may be perfectly certain we should not present them. Our interest in the whole matter is merely one of dollars. Love of art, and educating the public taste, and so forth, sound very well in the abstract, but they do not pay. These things are of enormous cost in the scenery, the putting on the stage, the costumes, and, as far as the actors are concerned, to-day we are compelled to pay a higher price for limbs than for genius.
Now, this sounds very plausible, and there is, no doubt, a vast amount of reason in it. Certain it is that, if the public kept away from such exhibitions, the manager would scarcely ruin himself by presenting them to empty houses. But are good plays so scarce, and why?
Shakespeare, we fear, is almost out of the question. We confess, in common with very many, a secret misgiving, almost amounting to horror, at the idea of going to see Desdemona or Banquo doubly murdered. The education of the vast majority of our actors renders them incapable of catching the meaning of the great master’s words, far less of interpreting them in a manner to enchain our attention or enthrall our senses: the invariable result when we sit down to read them. We generally find one or two characters ably sustained, and the rest, as a rule, rendered absolutely ridiculous. Notwithstanding, we take it as a very encouraging thing, and a great sign of advancement in intelligence and education, to see in one instance, at least, this class of drama drawing houses the whole year through. The more we have of such plays, the less we shall see of Black Crooks and Lalla Rookhs. Sheridan, again, and Colman are almost beyond our actors, though they are scarcely a hundred years old. An actor undertaking a character must understand not merely the words he utters, but the character he represents, the position it holds in the play, its bearings on the others; for our modern actors are too apt to consider that there is only one character in every play, and that their own. The costume, mode of life, look, gait, air, tout ensemble, should fit the person to the age in which he lived. Now, how many of those employed to personate the fops, or fools, or men about town of Sheridan, know the age in which those characters lived, the mode of conversation, the walk, “the nice conduct of the clouded cane,” the way of passing the time, the affected laugh and pronunciation of certain letters, the ceremony thrown into a bow or a proffer of a pinch of snuff, with a thousand other little things only to be found in a close study of the writers of the time? Yet, without this intimate knowledge, our modern actor must trust to his wig and antique coat and ruffles to give us an idea of Charles Surface or Sir Peter Teasle. Passing regretfully by these, then, we come to the question before us, the drama of to-day, where we atone for lack of genius by sensation; where words give place to “business”; where for a good author we substitute a good carpenter, aided by a good scene-painter; where a conflagration, or a shipwreck, or a cab, drive Shakespeare and the rest off the boards. Wherein lies the excellence of the sensational school of playwrights? Strip them of their drowning scenes, fires, chloroform, and slang phrases, and what have we left? Simply nothing. Not a single conception of a great idea or a great character; no noble purpose to fire the soul; no keen wit to scorch the age and purify while it burns; but in their stead sorry jokes, and the meanest and most ordinary characters speaking bad grammar; with plenty of howling, and climbing, and swimming, and water and fire and limelight, and a stirring song that is not the author’s, all interspersed with stray spars of wit floating about here and there in the heterogeneous mass, and turning up at happy places—wit, by the way, which is generally stolen from the French or from some well-known story, all adjusted to slow music, set to magnificent scenery, with mechanism enough to construct a city; and the audience, wheedled there by puff, is amazed and overcome, and, going away, tells its friends that there is not much in it, but the scenery alone is well worth the money.
This is undoubtedly the English drama of the day, dividing the palm with the anatomical exhibitions we have previously referred to, and almost as prolific of good results to the public. Eileen Oge, one of the latest and best plays of this class, was the only one which attracted audiences to that splendid failure, the Grand Opera House.
There is another class of play to which we promised to refer—the modern French school—which finds its home in one of our theatres, and which, by lavish expenditure, the splendor of costume, excellence of mounting, and general efficiency of the cast, has proved more or less a success. They pass among us as dramas of society. Let us examine the most recent of these “society plays,” and see if they are worthy of their name.
Article 47 runs as follows: A lover, in a moment of jealousy, shoots his mistress, attempting at the time to gain possession of a casket belonging to her. She escapes with life, but that life is dead to her, for her beauty, though not destroyed, is for ever marred. Her love changes to hate. She appears as a witness against her lover on a charge of attempted murder and robbery. He is acquitted of wilful attempt to kill, but condemned to five years at the galleys, and placed for ever, by Article 47 of the penal code, under police surveillance. Both lives are embittered, the one with the consciousness of a wrong done to the woman he loved, but loves no longer; the other from the consciousness of, to her, an irreparable loss sustained, a beauty marred in the dawn of life, and a love contending with hate for the man who once loved her, and whom she still, in her sane moments—for the crash of contending emotions and the brooding over her lost life are goading her to madness—loves. The term of his confinement ended, the lover changes his name, flies to Paris, and hopes thus to escape the surveillance of the police. He enters society again, and falls in love with an old acquaintance who has ever loved him. They are married. In society he meets with the old love. She recognizes him, and, finding that his love is turned to abhorrence, hate again strives for mastery, and she compels him to frequent the salon where she is to be seen, and spend a certain time of each day in her society, on pain of disclosing to his wife that he is a convicted felon, and the whole story of her wrong. In a moment of despair he unfolds all to his wife in her presence; they determine to fly. The madness has been working all this time in the other’s blood. She retains enough reason to send a message to the prefect of police, disclosing the person and whereabouts of the ex-prisoner. The letter is intercepted, and she finally dies at his feet, still mad, and thinking that he loves her. The play is a powerful one, but revolting. The gradual growth of the madness in the woman is well worked up. But the woman is a fiend, and her fiendishness is the whole point of the play. We have women as bad or worse in plays that are infinitely superior, Lady Macbeth, for instance; but the mastermind that conceived that character conceived it aright—laid it bare in all its hideousness, and surrounded it with such moral strength and contrasts that we hate it. The French writer enlists a forced sympathy for his heroine. Everybody is in a chronic state of misery all the way through; the vice of the thing is condoned or glossed over, and the character most to be pitied at the end is the hideous thing that is called a woman. It is a delineation and upholding of a false principle from beginning to end; and, if such is society, we can only pity it. While there are such things as truth, honor, womanly nature, and manly strength among us, such a play should hold no place in our midst; and the writer debases his talents when he can turn them to so much better account. Most French plays of the modern school come to us in this fashion. They are all unhealthy, morbid, false to God and man; and though they are well written, abounding in felicitous repartee, clever tirades against society, witty mockery of characters that go down among us, and in their English dress are stripped of the dangerous équivoque and double entendre, it is better for us either to let them alone, or so change them that we do not recognize them, as the late Mr. Robertson succeeded in doing. All, or nearly all, of his comedies were originally founded on the French. But he did not reproduce; he adapted. And his plays, the most charming, as they are by far the wittiest and most brilliant, of the day, are always presentable, always enjoyable, though they strike out no great thought, nor, indeed, aim at it, but are clever satires on society as we find it, as it comes and goes. We should very much like to see them produced oftener here. There is only one house which, as a rule, attempts this class of play; and its programme has to be changed so often that it looks very much as though the public did not appreciate its efforts. Yet we have never met with a single person who has witnessed one of Mr. Robertson’s plays and would not be very happy to witness another. We think the fault lies chiefly with the company. The rank and file are not adequate. At the Prince of Wales’ theatre in London the same company performs still that performed when Mr. Robertson first produced his plays; and each one of them, from first to last, is a thorough actor. We hear a great deal about people, immediately they make a hit, demanding an enormous increase of salary; and, if their demands are not conceded, rushing off to “star it in the provinces.” In England it is just the reverse. If actors can obtain a footing at all in London, they abide there. And we cannot but think that, if fair inducements were held out here, a stock company of excellent actors could be organized who might form a school; and the manager would not be compelled to hunt Europe for a name, and spend a small fortune nightly on a single individual, which he might much more judiciously divide among his own staff, and keep his house well filled in spite of all the stars of the firmament.