Pantomimes have always been less concerned with the imaginative, the more-than-human, than with the extraordinarily actual. Some will remember the artillery bombardment which was introduced one Christmas during the war into a Pantomime at Drury Lane, which was, if I remember rightly, superficially the story of The Sleeping Beauty. It was good fun that bombardment, much better fun than are the majority of these topical excrescences, but one felt that it had been introduced because the principal comedian had got bored with the comparative sober quietness of that land of imagination in which the inhabitants of a fairy-tale progress as if seen in a glass darkly. He had, therefore, deliberately pulled the story out of its semi-supernatural country into the limelight, and was rewarded by instant mirth and vociferous applause from nine-tenths of the audience. Only a few children hesitated, feeling the pangs of a violent up-rooting, a being torn out of a land, through which they had been slowly but with intense delight travelling, into a mass of gesticulating faces ranged in circles watching the elaborate and apparently comic contortions of two small grotesque figures on what was obviously the stage.
I have no doubt at all that the instincts and judgment of children in these matters is far superior to that of the majority of their elders. The steady vulgarisation in the theatre of fairy-tales originally the inventions of adult minds of phantasy and sensibility superior to the general is a record of the debasing influence of the mass of the inhabitants of our large cities, who are dissatisfied with less than an instant reaction to the efforts of those whom they pay to amuse them. They are too restless to submit to sit quietly and by slow degrees receive the heritage of beauty accumulated by the ambages of minds whose devious and amazed wanderings are like the apparently directionless perambulation of bees who are, without pause, gathering honey.
Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Ali Baba—whatever they be, the essence of these Pantomimes is something grosser than any fairy-tale, and, whether borrowed from the brothers Grimm, or Andersen, or any other source, their fragile and mysterious beauty is roughly obliterated to give place to an obvious rough-and-tumble humour and crude topicality of the kind that not one in a million could miss. Of course the somewhat "hearty" atmosphere of Christmas-time is not conducive to fineness of vision. The subtler outlines in which resides the beauty of a fairy-tale, a girl, or a mountain are not to be grasped by eyes slightly dazzled with the inner glow of good feeding—that glow which has more heat than light. It is a time when a joke has to be obvious to be seen, and the propensity to enormous girth perceptible in the most popular characters of Pantomime may have a similar origin; but I speak from a painful experience when I declare that for a Christmas Pantomime nothing can be too crude, too stale, too trivial to be funny, and that the best condition in which to go to the Pantomime would be that in which you could see simultaneously the largest number of Moons.
The Change in the Pantomime
The Pantomime has become a sort of Christmas Revue, and parents in large numbers have ceased taking their children to these entertainments, appealing as they almost exclusively do to the "grown-up." In their place we have had of late years a large number of children's plays, of which Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan is the best known. It is years since I saw Peter Pan, but I was, I remember, greatly taken with it, and went during that season five or six times. Part of the attraction it had for me lay in the charming personality of Peter himself, as played by Miss Pauline Chase, whose postcard portraits I bought in large numbers and gazed on adoringly for long intervals in the seclusion of my own room. But the very fact that the play gave scope to a young actress to embody a figure of such originality and charm as Peter must be accounted as a virtue in the author.
I know there are people who object to fairy-tales. They have lately been greatly cheered by the public confession of Madame Montessori that she belongs to them. Apparently the essence of their and also of her objection to such seemingly innocent and delightful inventions of the human brain is that the most desperate need of children is for a steady inculcation of facts. Having schooled your child in facts—writes in a letter to the Observer the gentleman who knows the Secret of Human Power—in the pleasantest manner possible up to the age of, say, sixteen, then the lessons to be derived from fiction may be gently and cautiously dealt with. The spectacle of an adult dealing "gently and cautiously" with a fairy-tale is one of those which seem to have been invented as a subject for a Max Beerbohm cartoon; but it is curious that anyone should have such a narrow conception of reality as to think that it is compassed in material facts. How one is to present love, honour, bravery, beauty, virtue, daring, adventurousness, and all the other qualities of the human mind except by imaginative creation, when they are purely creations of men's minds, I cannot see. Perhaps these deluded realists imagine that they are abstract nouns. They would have us say: "Here, dear children, are a number of abstract nouns; contemplate them as you would marbles, but remember that they are not marbles or even peanuts but nouns. You cannot play with them, you cannot eat them, and what good they are nobody knows, but everybody is supposed to know their names, as there is no other way of distinguishing them one from another." This same champion of Madame Montessori's Anti-Fairy-Tale Campaign writes further in his letter to the Observer that Shakespeare's plays "were not written specially for children, but as morality incentives distinctly for adults." This is a pitiful notion for any intelligent adult to have, and one that no child with a mind not distorted by unnatural virtue could be expected to understand. It is most expressive of that horrible "seriousness" which seizes some minds like a cramp until the sufferer drowns himself in an ocean of blithering nonsense, refusing all the ropes which the onlookers on terra firma throw him, because their faces are convulsed with laughter. "Morality incentives"—to cling to the shocking expression of Madame Montessori's disciple—are of two kinds. They are either negative or positive. The negative class is the only one that an Anti-Fairy-Tale League could put in its syllabus. It consists of a series of ejaculations: Do not drink! Do not swear! Do not tell lies! etc. Drawn up in an amended form suitable for children, it might read like this:
(1) Do not drink your brother's ginger-beer.
(2) and (3), etc. Do not imitate your parents.
It may appear excellent advice, but virtue—as many religious teachers have suspected and modern science is proving—does not reside in turning oneself into a van-load of inhibitions. Virtue is wholly positive, it is an expression of the spirit. He that imagines virtue is virtuous, and no other. It is a fairy-tale that men are trying to live in the world, and it can only be expressed in art. There is no virtue in a mere exhortation to be virtuous. Nobody takes any notice of exhortations, and quite rightly; but men who have seen a vision will try to capture it. What the creative artist does is to give men a vision of virtue, of beauty (for beauty is virtue), and it is just this vision which the Montessori teachers would have us put behind the backs of children while they glue their eyes to material things.
Not only would this practice be pernicious, it would be impossible to carry out, for, brought to its logical conclusion, the theory would demand the abolition of the teaching of mathematics and of science, as well as of poetry and of drama; or rather it would reduce mathematics to the counting of beads, science to the naming of smells (a return to "stinks" from which the schools are just escaping), poetry to this sort of thing:
Last night in pulling off a sock
I gave my little nose a knock.
To-day in jumping to get up
I fell across my brindle pup.