When the buckle-trade declined some years ago, the cause was at once seen to be the ascendency of buttons. But it would appear that the cause of the decline of theatricals, though almost equally obvious, is more a subject of dispute. It is only so because the subject is larger, and composed of more parts. We think, however, that a little discussion will suffice to show, with equal clearness, what causes the failure of dramatic amusements, as a part of the great system of public entertainment.
Taking the middle of the last century as a period when dramatic exhibitions were generally well attended, let us inquire what there was in the condition and circumstances of the theatre at that period to have rendered this a matter of course. We reply at once, that plays were then as well written, as well got up, and as well acted, as any picture was then painted, or any novel or poem written. The drama was at that time on a perfect level with, or perhaps even superior to, the current literature of the day, or any other instrument of public amusement which existed. Nor was it beneath the standard of the general manners of society. It exhibited, in a gross enough manner, the vices of the age; but the people whose vices were exhibited were rendered insensible by those very vices to the grossness of the scene.
The theatre is now in quite a different condition from what it was in then. Whether owing to the want of legislative enactments, which might encourage literary men in writing for the theatre, or to some other cause, our dramatic entertainments are now of a character much beneath or behind the age. Our acting plays are either the old stock, displeasing us with the exhibition of obsolete vices; or modern trash, full of exaggerated character and sentiment, trusting for success, perhaps, to romantic scenery and machinery; or literal transcripts of nursery fables. Our drama, overlooking some better qualities, is, in a great measure, a compound of childishness, indecency, buffoonery, and, to no small extent, of profanity; in every point of view fifty years in taste behind our current fictitious literature, which, in itself, is susceptible of great amendment.
In Great Britain the drama has always appealed to the less serious and virtuous part of the community. At the time of the civil war, and after the re-establishment of the theatre at the Restoration, it was altogether a Cavalier thing, and, like the Cavalier party in general, too apt to make debauchery a mark of rectitude in politics. This character it has never entirely shaken off. With the exception of a certain number of mawkish and tawdry aphorisms scattered over our modern plays, they still maintain, in some measure, their old war against the decencies and proprieties of life. The truth is, the theatre has become so exclusively resorted to by a less serious part of the community, that it could hardly attempt to conciliate the other class, lest, in the vain effort, it lose the customers it has.
If the players thus produce an article of entertainment inferior both in talent and in taste to the other things which compete for the business of amusing the public, it is not to be wondered at that their houses are deserted. For the crown which at present purchases a night’s entertainment at the theatre to one member of a family—an entertainment partly childish, perhaps, and almost certain to be somewhat immoral—that whole family can be supplied for a whole month with the best literary productions of the day from a circulating library, or it can purchase a single volume, which not only gives it rational entertainment and instruction for several nights, but remains a constant and ready instrument for repeating this entertainment and instruction whenever it is required. If we coolly reflect on the respective reputations which the drama and literature bear in the world, we will find that only a certain number of people wish well to the former, while the latter is an object of almost universal attachment and national pride. The fact is, that the drama has shut itself out by its own misconduct from the sympathies of half the public, if not a much larger portion. It is still dabbling in the low vices and mean order of feelings which prevailed in the reign of George the Second, or else in the nursery tales which lulled our cradles; while literature, shooting far ahead, is replete with the superior virtues and extensive benevolences of the present age. And not only does literature compete with the stage. Music, and other accomplishments of private life, are also now resorted to, for the purpose of furnishing an innocent amusement to the family circle—an amusement less attractive, perhaps, than the theatre, which, with all its errors, has still a powerful inherent charm, but preferred, nevertheless, as making up in simplicity, harmlessness, and cheapness, what it wants in the power of excitement.
When we speak of the stupidity and bad taste of the plays, we do not enumerate all the disadvantages of the theatre. As if every thing connected with the establishment were doomed to be of the same order, we find the players also exciting disgust in all well-regulated minds by the strange code of morality which they have been pleased to set up for themselves. Of course, we do not shut our eyes to the numerous instances of respectable and well-behaved actors, which occur nowhere, perhaps, so frequently as in the minor capital which we inhabit. But, as we remarked in a former paper, we must not have great generalities ruined or broken down by unimportant exceptions. Taken as a whole, the players are a more dissolute fraternity than the members of any other profession; while some of them, ranking as the very highest in professional merit, commit transcendent breaches of the most sacred moral laws, as if to show how independent they are of all the rules of decent society. We would not gratify the wretched vanity which perhaps is one of the principal causes of those errors, by mentioning particular cases; but they are too notorious to require being specified. It is sometimes set forward as a plea for the extenuation of those offences, that the life of a player is more beset with temptations than any other. But what an argument is here against the whole system of play-acting! Another plea is, that the public has no business with any thing but the public appearance of a player—has no right to think of their private lives; as if a person doing all he can to destroy the safeguards of domestic happiness by action and example, were to be equally well treated by society, as a person who does what is in his power to contribute to its happiness. Society must, in the eyes of these pleaders, be a slavish thing indeed, if it is supposed that it must patiently submit to every insult and injury which it may please the sublime caprice of a buffoon to inflict upon it. And is the player judged less leniently than an offender in any other walk of life? When a tradesman commits an outrage on public decency, is he cherished on account of it by society? Is he not scouted for it, exactly as the player is, or, we should rather say, ought to be—for it can hardly be said that he is ever condemned for his offences by the regular friends of the stage, though the theatre is, on his account, still more resolutely abstained from by the good, who abstained from it before.
If the players thus debase themselves by the impurity of their lives, and thereby render themselves unfit to be looked upon or listened to by the majority of society—if they continue to represent dramas suited to the taste of a past age, or else adapted only to the sympathies of children—if they persist in retaining about their whole system vicious forms of speech, indelicate gestures, and a code of moral feeling and action, all of which have long been pronounced intolerable in good society, how can they expect their theatres to be so prosperous as they once were, more especially when purer and better modes of entertainment are every where rising into competition with them? The person who pens these thoughts is by no means an enemy to theatricals in the abstract. With the most respectful deference to those who see in dramatic entertainments an express hostility to the divine law, he retains the conviction that they might be rendered as good and innocent a means as any other for producing that great end—the diversion of the public mind by amusement from the follies and vices of absolute vacuity. He does not consider the theatre, or any other amusement, so much with a reference to the good which it may do, as with respect to the evil which it may prevent. It is clear, however, that the really good and pure can never become the friends of the theatre, so long as it remains unreformed. There must be a combination among the virtuous actors to exclude the vicious from their body. A number of antiquated and absurd fashions of the stage must be brought nearer to the standard of ordinary natural life. And the best literary men of the day must be encouraged by legislative enactments to produce a crop of new plays with a stronger moral bent than the generality of those now existing. Till all this is done, and the theatre become as noted in public fame for a friendliness to what is good, as it has hitherto been for the reverse, it must be content to occupy its present degraded place amongst our prevailing modes of public entertainment.
RECOGNITIONS.
“Dignus vindice nod-us.”——
If you be a person that have lived for a long time in any large town, you must have ere this felt the dreadful inconvenience of knowing and being known by every body. The courtesy of society demands that, on meeting any one in the street, of whom you have the slightest acquaintance, you must not “affect to nod,” like Alexander, but give a real bona fide nod, or, if you please, a bow, as a mark of respect or regard—a practice which leads to a thousand disagreeable sensations in the day, till at last you almost resolve that your progress shall be like that of a British war-chariot—CUTTING right and left, without regard to man, woman, or child. It is not that you have any abstract disinclination to pay this tribute to friendship; it is the frequency and the iteration of the thing that annoys you. You could tolerate, perhaps, a certain number of nods in the day—I would willingly compound for twenty—and it would be all very well if you only met a friend on the street once in the month or so. But this is not the way of it: you cannot be abroad two hours (supposing that you are of long standing in the town) without meeting fifty people and upwards, to whom you must “vail your haughty head,” and, what is worst of all, the half of these are people whom you met and nodded to yesterday, and the day before, and every day before that again, back to the creation of the world. With many of these persons, your acquaintance at first was of the very slightest nature. You met the man in a steam-boat, and had your respective names mentioned by a friend. You left a room one day as he was entering, and you were introduced, and, after exchanging only three words, made a friendly bow to each other, and parted. Perhaps he was introduced to you passingly on the street by some person to whom you had been introduced several years before, in the same transient way, by an individual whose acquaintance of you was originally of so slight a character that you had even then forgot for some years how it commenced. Your reminiscences upon the whole subject are a Generation of Shadows, traced back to Nothing. Possibly you sat next to him one night, “consule Planco,” at a mason-lodge, and to this blessed hour have never so much as learned his name. When it happens that you do not see or meet these acquaintances for six months after your first rencontre, the affair has by that time got cool enough to justify you mutually in cutting each other. But in most cases it happens quite differently. On the very morning, perhaps, after having scraped acquaintance with a merry fellow in some promiscuous company, you meet him going abroad, like yourself, to his place of business. As nothing of the world, or its concerns, has as yet got between you and your recollections of last night’s conviviality, you pull up with him for a minute, shake hands, laugh cordially in each other’s faces, hope each other is quite well after yesternight’s business, remark what a deal of fun there was, what a deuced funny fellow that was who sung the comic songs, and so forth; and then, with another cordial shake of each other’s hands, you part off, each to the serious duties of the day. Unfortunately, it happens that this new acquaintance of yours has to go to his place of business exactly at the same time in the morning with yourself, and that your places of residence and business are co-relatively in opposite situations. It is, therefore, your doom to cross each other’s path regularly every morning at ten minutes before ten, for all the rest of your natural lives. Your eyes begin to open upon this appalling fact on the second day. You meet your man then, exactly at the same spot as on the morning before; when, the conviviality of the penult evening being totally spent, both in respect of its effect on your mind, and as a subject of conversation, you stand in an agony of a minute’s duration, talking to each other of you know not what, till, fortunately, perhaps, a friend comes up who is going your way, and you hook yourself upon him, and take a hurried leave of your new acquaintance. Next morning you content yourself with shaking your friend by the hand cordially without stopping. Next morning, again, the affair has degenerated into a laughing nod. Next, it is an ordinary nod; at which point it continues ever after, till it is evident to both of you, as you approach each other, that you are beginning to be fairly tired of existence, and wish, mutually, that it were all well over with you, so far as this breathing world is concerned, and the whole affair hushed up in the silence of the grave.