Yes, Ernie Mayne may still sing his songs of Araby, but little by little he is being borne down by the American raconteur, whose impropriety is always in the best of taste, by the ragtime dancer, by the wandering Italian fiddler, by the respectable eccentric at the piano, by the juggler, by the refined soprano, who sings ‘God send you back to me, over the mighty sea,’ or, ‘There’s a little mother always yearning for the ones that long to roam.’ It’s all getting so clean, so precious pure. The old comedian will not last long. He that was once a bull in a china-shop will soon become a Stolled ox.
But the worst may yet have to come. A new demon is arising in the shape of the cinema. It is as if Merrie England, that once lived at the Surrey Theatre and the Globe, and was driven out when the middle class began to frequent the theatre about 1870 and took refuge in the caves of harmony, then doubled back into the Tivoli and the Oxford (fortunately to provide what the late W. T. Stead called ‘drivel for the dregs’), were being pursued. Wherever Merrie England goes, it seems that, as Mark Sheridan used to put it, ‘the villain thtill purthued her, purthued her, purthued her.’ When the music-hall has been completely improved I wonder whether he will be glad to have ‘purthued her’ to such good purpose. Certainly, in the cinemas, little is left of the old spirit that arose as one drank one’s beer in the stalls at the old Mogul, for the cinema, let police magistrates say what they like, bears deep upon its brow the brand of Abel.
The cinema, like most new and virile things, has split opinion, and has collected round itself more unwise friends and unthinking enemies than any other form of entertainment. Few people like cinemas; they either love them or loathe them, while a few, I suppose, fall into my section of feeling and hate them for not being better than they are. For I believe in the cinema; I do not think that the cinema will do away with the theatre and the novel, but I do believe that it is destined to play a still larger part in the amusement of the people. Also, I believe that it is destined to play a cleaner, that is, a more artistic part. How far it can be brought, I do not know, because I do not suppose that I am the one chosen by nature to raise it high; but if we consider films such as The Birth of a Nation, or Intolerance, where Mr D. W. Griffith, a man of some slight culture, is not entirely devoid of taste, and certainly bold in his conceptions, audacious in his execution, we cannot wave the cinema away with a sneer at cowboy drama.
The cinema began with cowboy drama, with silly pursuits on horseback, by motor-car and by train, but that was only because, for the first time, movement could be reproduced. The reproduction of movement was a new pleasure, and so the mob clamoured for it. Carry yourself back to your first film and, be you as highbrowed as you like, you will not deny that you enjoyed those febrile races, those people falling out of windows, crashing through ceilings, the violent opening and shutting of doors, the rush of flying crockery. Then you grew tired of it and began to think it silly. Well, it was silly, and it is silly, but we should remember that the pioneers of the cinema were Americans of the travelling-showman type, men whose fathers had exhibited the camera obscura loved of our fathers; they had passed through dissolving views, and that type of man could not be expected to like, and therefore to put forward, a dramatic version of Paradise Lost. Briefly, the cinema was put forward by the vulgar, for the vulgar, but by degrees, as the mob grew weary of movement for movement’s sake, as the profits increased, new men such as Pathé, Urban, Gaumont, came in. They were commercial men, but not vulgar men, men who realised that if there was a public for the novels of Mr E. F. Benson and the plays of Mr Alfred Sutro, there must be a cinema public for something less lurid than the early films. By degrees, the cinema improved; it improved in conceptions when subjects such as Quo Vadis?, The Walls of Jericho, Bella Donna, appeared on the film; yet more ambitious things were done in the shape of Hamlet, Julius Cæsar, Justice, Intolerance, and many more.
The film improved, too, in its actual execution. The earliest type of film actor was scraped up from the East Side gutters of New York and the graving-docks of Naples. For that early cinema you needed creatures immensely unrestrained, yelling, dancing, dirty creatures, not at all the people who could have impersonated what the old lady in the pit called the ‘married life of the dear Queen.’ And as the subjects changed the actors changed; many were taken from the stage; some, to this day, preserve certain characteristics of the ordinary human being. It is not quite their fault if they do not preserve them all; the cinema has had time to make a tradition of its own, which is still represented by the American posters we see upon the walls, where the heroines have enormous eyes and more teeth than Lulu Dentifrice; where the young men have straight backs to their heads, half a pound of white meat on each cheek, a rugged brow, or an emetic grin, briefly, the most brutal type of Chicago commercial rigged out in the dress clothes of a suicide; where ladies whose clothing is too low for blouses and too high for evening frocks, whose jewels flash beyond the dreams of Gophir, quaff the sparkling champagne wine. Where the illustrator manages to make Miss Irene Vanbrugh look vulgar. Where American policemen (or admirals, you never know) arrest crooks in mid-air; where all is six-shooters, bowie-knives, cinches, and snarks. Like poster like player, is, to a certain extent, true, for the producer is still a cross between Pimple and the sort of stockbroker whose silk hat glitters in eight places. (Observe the band on his cigar.) But that producer, like that poster, is the old tradition, and is giving way before the ordinary business man who does not see the world in terms of banana falls. That new man is not pressing his actors as the old producer did. He still makes them register, but less intensely. Register means to mark the emotions. When the hero is being filmed, and the heroine enters, he smiles; if he does not smile beatifically enough the producer will cry to him: ‘Register delight!’ You have all seen the result. In the old days they were registering all the time; you could see the heroine registering terror, while the hero registered nobility, and the villain registered hate; meanwhile, the old mother dropped a stitch and registered benevolence with extreme pertinacity, and, all the time, servants in the background were registering national pride and rectitude. One still has to do these things on the cinema because, after all, the cinema picture has to be photographable. It has to be seen rather plainly, but the cinema producer has begun to understand that, to be effective, facial expression need not be recognisable a mile away.
It is the excessive vigour of the cinema has endeared it to Londoners; most of them are a rather lymphatic crowd, because they live in too large a city, surrounded by too many interesting things, because they eat rather bad food and not enough of it, and also because most of them work in stuffy offices and factories. Thus they need strong stimuli if they are to react, and no doubt that is why cinemas are being established one by the side of the other, and run for ten hours a day. Like the sensational stories in the magazines, like the newspapers which consist in much headline and little text, they spur this tired creature. The more he is spurred, the more tired he grows. The more tired he grows, the more he needs spurring. So the cinema must prosper. But I think it will prosper in a more moderate way; it will continue to grow, to absorb theatres and music-halls; it has already absorbed the Coronet, the Canterbury, Sadler’s Wells, the Tivoli, the Scala, the London Opera House, and others; but I think it will more and more tend to produce the historical film, films based on novels and plays of some slight merit; that it will increasingly provide bearable music. For a while it may not originate much, and therefore it will not easily become a form of art. I am not sure that it can become a form of art, though I do not know why: the ballet is a form of art, and people like Nijinsky, Pavlova, Madame Rambert (let alone Taglioni and Genée) have made a great deal of it. I do not say that it is impossible for the cinema to produce a work of art, but this must be within the limits of pantomime, which are close and narrow limits. Subtle emotions it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this, because she thought that he thought that.’ (If a cinema company will film The Golden Bowl, I will burn seven candles as an offering to the Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave to the play and the novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. Because it cannot speak, it must move, and so it is a different kind of thing.
That does not mean that it need always be the rather crude thing it is to-day. As people of better taste come into the business, we are likely to do away with a few of the continual changes of scene; we shall reduce repetitions, such as the woman who endlessly rocks the baby’s cradle between every tragic scene in Intolerance. Repetition is the way in which a crude taste rams its point home; a fine taste will select its points better, need to make them less obvious, know how to vary them. The selective art of the novelist can thus be applied. Also, the finer taste will not corrupt the actor as hitherto he has been corrupted, by leading him into a wilderness of monkeys. The cinema will learn restraint, that first need of all art. Some of the actors, such as Norma Talmadge, Pauline Frederick, Mary Pickford, and especially Charlie Chaplin, have already evolved a new form of acting, and not a mean one. When Charlie Chaplin runs along a road, in that queer, lolloping way which starts from the shoulders and animates his fingers and his elbows, chasing a Rolls-Royce that is obviously travelling at a hundred and twenty miles an hour, when thereupon he falls into a ditch, and extricates himself with an air of incredulity, when he then appears to realise, with a detachment that none but Plato could have equalled, that he is not likely to catch that car, and decides to go home, Charlie Chaplin does a wonderful thing: he turns his back on the audience, and you know, from a little ripple in his back that he is considering the situation. Then the head gives a jerk, one of the shoulders goes up, the fingers give a twist, and long before Charlie Chaplin turns round to face the audience, with his soft eyes laughing, his animate body has told you what he meant: ‘It’s gone. Oh, well, I don’t care.’ The popularity of others may wane, but Charlie Chaplin is a monument. As in the case of the music-halls, a merciless audience has formed, and its love has readily been given to the best.