Part 2 — USE AND ABUSE OF THE STAGE.

We are a very theatrical people. The old unbending Puritan stuff has almost died out amongst us; whether for better or worse, such is the fact. If a Brutus appeared in our midst to-day, he would be dubbed a “rowdy”; a Cato, a decided bore. Where we would not turn to look at them, we rush pell-mell to catch the first glimpse of a prince; even a lord finds a following here that must rather surprise him in a nation where he only expected to meet with the stern virtues of republicanism. We crowd in the same way to see a new “star” in the theatrical firmament, whether that star’s radiance consist in a melodious voice, or a dexterous use of the limbs, or a display of physical charms, so artistically concealed that not one of them is missed. So we throng to hear a great preacher or a loud one, provided he is “puffed” enough. Our politics have degenerated into a money-making concern; our religion, almost to a fashion. As it was a fashion in the old days when the Pharisee went up to the temple to pray, and his prayer consisted in thanking God that he was so far above the poor publican, together with a grand recital of his fastings and self-flagellations, and alms given to the poor; as it was a fashion later on, in the time of the Puritans and the Scotch under right John Knox, as Carlyle would call his hero—when the godly sat out their two hours’ sermon, and at the end applauded, and begged the preacher to continue, and sat them grimly a two hours more; going their way, comforted at heart, to murder Cavalier and Catholic, and all who wore the mark of the beast and the color of the scarlet woman.

We have touched on religion, for it is inwoven with our theme, the theatre, which sprang from religion, and, could it be made to preach as it has done, would, without lack of amusement or attraction, become a house of prayer, and not, as it now is, a home of corruption. The Greeks used it for a twofold purpose: to lash vice or as a political weapon. And nothing pierced so fatally the thick hide of the low demagogue, Cleon, as the barbed shafts of Aristophanes, scattered with all the great master’s skill among the keen-witted and appreciative Athenians. We see a similar instance to-day in the attack by one of the leaders of the modern French drama on a much greater man than Cleon. The Rabagas of Sardou has tended to demoralize Gambetta more than the holocaust he sacrificed, in his unwise and inopportune zeal, to the glory of France, as he would claim; in reality to its ruin. It has done more to lower him in the eyes of the people than the terrible logic of events. Why have not we a man to do the like for the rings and the political immorality that inundates us; from which we are only just beginning to emerge, without the certainty of not sinking beneath it again?

The stage with the Greeks was, moreover, a preacher. It held up lofty thoughts in language worthy of them. It preached the virtue of self-sacrifice and its nobleness in tones that could not fail to be heard. It did not mock the false with puny laughter and weak travestie; but laid it bare in all its ugliness, cutting deep into it and round about it, probing the soil that it grew in, piercing its thick rind with a weapon whose wound was death. And there stands out that wonderful play of the Prometheus Vinctus: the bold story of the god-born man, who, with the insight of the god-nature that was in him, saw the misery of his brethren, and dared to filch the sacred fire from heaven that he might lift them up from their degradation; who suffered on an eternity of woe, with the relentless bird ever gnawing at his vitals; and, as the curtain fell upon the convulsion of nature, foretold, in words indeed prophetic, the fall of Jove and of his false heaven. We read and stand amazed; wondering, now at the grace, now at the terrible power of the words; pitying the great and tameless soul enduring an agony unspeakable for his kind, chained there to the bare rock with the pitiless heavens above him, the starry-curtained night, and the ever-dimpling ocean smiling beneath him. We see Calvary and the Saviour there; and marvel at the boldness of the conception, the magnificence and prophetic truth of its carrying out. From this story of a pagan Greek, told to pagans before Christ came into the world, bearing the fire that he willed only to be kindled, we turn with shame and sickness at heart to the things of this day, of this era of civilization and enlightenment.

But first let us trace the course of the drama when it fell into Christian hands.

That fierce Northern blast which overthrew for ever the gorgeous fabric of the Roman Empire, withered and blighted everything that could be called intellectual or refined. The civilization, the literature, the very language of Greece and Rome, were extinguished, and the world had to begin its intellectual schooling anew. Then the church stepped in, and moulded those rough elements into a nobler race than that which had been swept away. The Roman had been taught to live for the state; the Christian was taught to live for Christ. The church filled their rugged minds with great ideas and noble purposes; she laid the foundation of a great faith, and on that built up everything. A belief in one Supreme God, in eternal joy for the good, eternal pain for the wicked: such was the doctrine, easily learned, easily understood, which she unceasingly poured into their untutored minds. It was a hard task. There was no press then; there were no newspapers, no telegraph wires flashing thought from world to world in less time than it takes to conceive it. Men were taught by word of mouth. And when we contemplate the magnitude of the work—the education and conversion of an illiterate world—we can only wonder at its success, and see therein the finger of God, guiding and directing his daughter—the one stumbling-block to the march of reason, according to our modern notions.

Then came up those quaint old miracle plays, performed at fairs and festivals, and sometimes even in the cathedrals and churches. They clothed the mysteries of religion in simple language, well adapted for simple minds, and brought home to the crowds assembled great and impressive truths. A relic of them to-day attracts the fashionable world, ennuyé of the opera, the conventional stage, and an existence weary of itself and its emptiness. It takes its opera-glasses and scent-bottles and flirtation to the rude rocks of the Tyrol to behold the Ammergau Passion Play. It is a novelty. We wonder that no enterprising manager has offered fabulous sums to bring the performers out here to us. They would certainly “draw.” To be sure, he could scarcely transport the Tyrol, but then the scene-painter and machinist could manage that. If the butterflies of fashion can find motive enough to brave the terrors of sea-sickness and flit out thither to behold a novelty, can sit it out without a yawn, and be struck by the reverence of the performance and its effect on the grave mountaineers, surely something far less taxing on our conventional notions, but bearing the germ of a great truth within it, might send the thousands who flock nightly to our theatres home with a thought in their heads and a more earnest feeling in their hearts.

The stage grew with the growth of time and the spread of education, till, at the close of the sixteenth century, we find it at its zenith in Spain and in England. The French and Italians never possessed a great stage—a stage, that is, for all time and all nations; the German is of recent growth. At this point the stage was great; was in the broad sense moral, elevating, high. It towered above men, above the times; it educated while it attracted them. In plot, in action, in delineation of character, in thrilling scenes and happy conceptions, the plays of the sixteenth century are unrivalled, while their language makes of them classics. Dr. Arnold of Rugby proposed that the English classics should be made one of the principal studies of boys at school. We wonder what benefit boys would derive from the study of the trash we listen to and applaud in these days—whether it would be better calculated to improve their morals than a close application to the pages of the Newgate Calendar or the columns of the Police News?

From that period the course of the stage has been a downward one passing from bad to worse, till it has been our fortune, with a solitary exception here and there, to light upon the worst; for the plays of the time of Charles II., bad as they are and revolting, are safer from their very outspokenness than the gilded licentiousness that allures us. We rival them in obscenity, as we fall immeasurably below them in wit. The reason of this decline, at a time when the discovery of the art of printing gave a new impetus to the spread of education, is foreign to our present purpose. With a glance at the past, at what the theatre was, and what it might become, we turn to that which immediately concerns us, the present: what the theatre now is, and why—restricting our remarks principally to New York.

Now the dramatic season has just drawn to a close,[203] so it is a fair time to indulge in a retrospect. We believe it has been on the whole what managers might term a fairly good season; that is, people have gone to the theatres, paid their money, and endorsed, by their presence and applause, the various species of entertainments which the managers, in their capacity of public caterers, have provided for them.

Our question is, What have we endorsed? What have been the theatrical “hits” of the season? What are the plays which have brought crowds to the theatre, money to the manager, and delight to the public at large? The answer, looked at soberly and honestly, is startling.

With the exception of the Shakespearian and a few other classical plays at one of the theatres, some transitory pieces got up occasionally for “stars,” and French adaptations, which we shall refer to after, we have not had a single play worthy of the name, worthy of the actors who performed them, worthy, we sincerely hope, of the audiences who witnessed them.

It may be as well to explain that by actors we mean ladies and gentlemen who are equal to the very difficult position they have taken upon themselves; who can speak pure English in a manner we can all understand—a slight qualification seemingly, yet in these days one of the rarest; who can portray emotions with fidelity; who can forget, first of all, themselves; secondly, the audience, in the character they have assumed. We do not mean those with whom vulgarity passes for wit, coarseness for humor, or a liberal display of the person for all that is needed. The name of the latter class is legion; the individuals who compose the former, exclusive of passing stars, might be almost counted on our fingers.

And now for the performances we have endorsed. The great attractions, the “hits” of the season, beyond Humpty Dumpty, which is no play at all, but a display of the antics of the cleverest mime who has appeared on our stage, have been the Black Crook and Lalla Rookh. These two pieces drew the largest crowds for the longest time; one of them is an old favorite, and vies with Humpty Dumpty in duration; the other, but for its untimely end by fire, was as likely to become so, and may yet, for all we know to the contrary. We wish to place this well before the public; the chief theatrical attractions in New York, the commercial capital of our Republic and the New World, during the past year, have been Humpty Dumpty, the Black Crook, and Lalla Rookh!

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.

But good plays are needed as much as good actors; and good plays we shall never have so long as managers can procure gratis the latest London success, which London itself has generally derived from a French source. Managers are cautious of new playwrights, and wisely so. But this caution may be, is carried a little too far. We have a society of our own, and a history of our own. We have already a host of clever and even brilliant writers. We have had a great war and a great convulsion. We have plenty to attack, and plenty to uphold. Our society, political, social, and religious, is scarcely what it might be. There is many a foul thing to sweep away; there is a meeting of many elements in this land of ours; there is a history to look back upon, and a glorious history to build up, if we build rightly. At the same time, there is a licentiousness, outspoken, scornful, and gaining ground day by day, which it is our duty to withstand by every force in our power. There is that aping, too, of the worst imported fashions, that running after wealth and rank, when they come among us, that betokens a wandering from the sturdy ways of our fathers. There is a widespread corruption in the administration of the law, a venality in political life, which it would be well to crush. There is here field enough for the native dramatist, without looking abroad for the “cheap and nasty.” Could a Sheridan rise up among us now, he would find no lack of subjects for his pen in the extravagance, the contradictions, the licentiousness of this age and this great Republic. At all events, if we must import, let us import the best, and not things which poison our life, and stop our intellectual and natural as well as our moral growth, and make us a laughing-stock to the outer world.