jewels five-words long,That on the stretched forefinger of all TimeSparkle forever.
But it can also attain poetry without the use of superb and sonorous phrases and solely by its choice of theme. This is what the poets have often felt, and as a result French lyrists, like Théophile Gautier and François Coppée, have not disdained to compose librettos for pantomimic ballets, 'Giselle' and the 'Korrigane.' One of the most successful of the recent Russian ballets was simply a representation of Gautier's poetic fantasy, 'One of Cleopatra's Nights,'
II
Perhaps because the pantomime contains only the essential element of the drama—action—it has always been a popular form of play; and it appears very early in the history of the theater. Indeed, it seems to be the sole type of play achievable by primitive man—if we may judge from observations made among savages who are still in the earlier periods of social development. Gesture precedes speech, and a pantomime was possible even before a vocabulary was developed. In the Aleutian Islands, for example, the pantomime is the only form of play known. One of the little plays of the islanders has been described. It was acted by two performers only, one representing a hunter, and the other a bird. The hunter hesitates but finally kills the bird with an arrow; then he is seized with regret that he has slain so noble a bird; whereupon the bird revives and turns into a beautiful woman who falls into the hunter's arms. This is the simplest of stories, but it lends itself to effective acting; it is capable of being interpreted adequately by means of gesture alone; and it is just the kind of play which would appeal to an Aleutian audience, being wholly within their experience and their apprehension.
Pantomime flourished in Rome and in Constantinople in the sorry years of the decline and fall of the empire; and it was then low and lascivious. A great part of the fierce hostility to the theater displayed by the Fathers of the Christian Church was due to the fact that the only drama of which they had any knowledge was pantomime of a most objectionable character, offensive in theme and even more offensive in presentation. With the conversion of the empire to Christianity, pantomimes of this type, appealing only to lewd fellows of the baser sort, was very properly prohibited. But pantomime of another type sprang up in the Middle Ages in the Christian churches to exemplify and to make visible to the ignorant congregations, certain episodes of sacred history. In the Renascence dumb-shows were represented before monarchs, at their weddings and at their stately entrances into loyal cities. And dumb-shows were often employed in the Elizabethan stage, sometimes as prologs to the several acts, as in 'Gorboduc,' for example, and sometimes within the play itself, as in 'Hamlet.'
In the eighteenth century pantomime had a double revival, in France and in England. In France, Noverre elevated theballet d'action, that is to say, the story told in pantomime and adorned with dances. Sometimes theseballets d'actionwere in several acts, relying for interest on the simple yet ingenious plot, and only decorated, so to speak, with occasional dances. From Noverre and from France the tradition of the pantomime with interludes of dancing, spread at first to Italy and Austria, and later to Russia.
In England the development of pantomime was upon different lines, due to the influence of the Italian comedy-of-masks, with its unchanging figures of Pantaleone, Columbina, and Arlecchino. These figures were still further simplified; and to Pantaloon, Columbine, and Harlequin there was added the characteristically British figure of the Clown. The most famous impersonator of the clown was Grimaldi, whose memoirs were edited by Charles Dickens. The mantle of Grimaldi fell upon an American, G. L. Fox, whose greatest triumph, in the late sixties, was in a pantomime called 'Humpty-Dumpty'—the riming prolog of which was written by A. Oakey Hall (then Tweed's mayor of New York). G. L. Fox and his brother, C. K. Fox (who was the inventor of the comic scenes), had been preceded in America by a family of French pantomimists known as the Ravels; and they were followed by the family known as the Hanlon-Lees, who had originally been acrobats, and who appeared in a French play, in which the other characters spoke while the Hanlon-Lees expressed themselves only in gesture. Here again Scribe had been before them, with his libretto for the opera of 'Masaniello,' in which there is a principal part for a pantomimic actress, Fenella. And when the great French actor, Frédéric Lemaître, had lost his voice by overstrain, Dennery wrote a play for him, the 'Old Corporal,' in which he appeared as a soldier of Napoleon's Old Guard, who had been stricken dumb during the retreat from Russia.
This exploit of Frédéric Lemaître's is not as extraordinary as it seems. A truly accomplished actor ought to be able to forgo the aid of speech. Even in our modern plays gesture is more significant than speech. To place the finger on the lips is more effective than to say "Hush!" The tendency of the modern drama on our amply lighted picture-frame stage is to subordinate the mere words to the expressive action. In Mr. Gillette's 'Secret Service,' for example, the impression is sometimes made rather by gesture than by speech; and a large portion of the most effective scene, that where the hero is wounded while he is sending a telegraph message, is presented in pantomime with little assistance from actual dialog. Similar effects are to be found in many of Mr. Belasco's plays, especially in the 'Darling of the Gods.' In all good acting the gesture precedes the word; and often the gesture makes the word itself unnecessary, because it has succeeded in conveying the impression and in making the full effect by itself, so that the spoken phrase lags superfluous.
III
In France in the final decades of the nineteenth century there was a wide-spread revival of interest in pantomime, where the art had been dormant since the days of Deburau. A society was formed for its encouragement, and a host of little wordless plays was the result. The most ambitious effort was the 'Enfant Prodigue,' a genuine comedy in three acts, by M. Michel Carré, with music by M. Alfred Wormser. This wordless play on the perennially attractive theme of the Prodigal Son proved to be the modern masterpiece of pantomime. It was limpidly clear in its story; it was ingeniously put together in its plot; it combined humor and pathos; and it was devoid of the acrobatic features and of the slap-stick fun which have generally been considered the inevitable accessories of pantomime. We had brought before us the dull and prim home life of old Pierrot and of his wife, and we were made to behold the impatience of young Pierrot with this prim dullness. We saw the Prodigal rob his father and go forth in search of pleasure. In the second act we were witnesses of the sad results of the pleasure young Pierrot had sought superabundantly, and we discovered that he had spent his money and that he was capable of descending to marked cards to win more gold to satisfy the caprices of the woman who had fascinated him. We saw his return with his ill-gotten gains after his charmer had been tempted to go off with a wealthier man. And in the third act we were taken back to the home of his broken-hearted parents; and we witnessed the Prodigal's return, poverty-stricken, disenchanted, and reformed. His mother takes him to her arms; but his father is obdurate. Then we hear the fife and drum afar off, and young Pierrot, if he has lived unworthily for himself, can at least die worthily for his country. So the old father relents and bestows his blessing on the erring son as the boy goes forth to war.
The art of the 'Enfant Prodigue' was at once delicate and firm; and its popularity was not confined to France. Here was a true play, moving to tears as well as to laughter, holding the interest by a human story of universal appeal. It was taken across the Channel from Paris to London, and from London it was taken across the ocean to New York. Augustin Daly, always on the alert for novelty, brought it out at his own theater, first with his own company, and then a little later with a French company. Excellent as was the performance of the French company, two characters were as well sustained by the American company. Charles Leclercq appeared as old Pierrot, and he had had in his youth experience in pantomime in England. Mrs. G. H. Gilbert appeared as Mrs. Pierrot, and in her youth she had been a ballet dancer, and had taken part in pantomimes. To these two performers the principles of the art of gesture were perfectly familiar; and it was a constant delight to follow the dexterity and the adequacy of their gestures. But Miss Rehan, who appeared as the Prodigal Son, had had no pantomimic experience, and she was not able to acquire the art offhand. In dozens of dramas she had revealed herself as an actress, not only of great personal charm, but also of great histrionic skill. Merely as an actress she was incomparably superior to the impersonator of the Prodigal Son in the French company; but merely as a pantomimist she was inferior. More than once she appeared as if she wanted to speak, failing because she was deprived of voice. Her gestures seemed like afterthoughts; they lacked spontaneity and inevitability. She suggested at moments that she was a poor dumb boy gasping for words.
Now, the convention underlying pantomime is that we are beholding a story carried on by a race of beings whose natural method of communicating information and ideas is gesture—just as the convention of opera is that we are beholding a story carried on by a race of beings whose natural method of communicating information and ideas is song. No such races of beings ever existed; but we must admit the existence of such races as a condition precedent to our enjoyment of pantomime and of opera. The spectators must accept the art as it is, and the performers must refrain from any suggestion that they would speak if they could. This underlying convention was viciously violated in "Professor" Reinhardt's overpraised 'Sumurun,' when the Hunchback gives a shriek of horror as he sees the woman he loves in the arms of another man. It is viciously violated again in the same play when Sumurun and two attendants are heard singing. If Sumurun can sing, why can she not speak? If the Hunchback can shriek and sob audibly, why is he ordinarily reduced to mere gesture?
'Sumurun' was provided with a plot devised by Herr Freksa, and with music composed by Herr Hollaender; and it was produced by "Professor" Max Reinhardt. The story was a little complicated, and it lacked the transparent simplicity of the 'Enfant Prodigue,' as it lacked also the broad humanity of the French piece. Its chief claim to attention was that it is an amusing spectacle, sensual as well as sensuous. Its humor had a Teutonic heaviness in marked contrast with the Gallic lightness of the 'Enfant Prodigue.' "Professor" Reinhardt sought eccentricity rather than originality, queerness rather than beauty. His effort was directed to the achieving of something unexpected and something different rather than to the attaining of something good in itself, or of something poetic. Esthetically, musically, dramatically the German pantomime was pitiably inferior to the French; and yet so potent and so permanent is the appeal of the wordless play that 'Sumurun' pleased a host of younger playgoers, not old enough to be able to recall the 'Enfant Prodigue' or 'Humpty-Dumpty,' the Hanlon-Lees, or the Ravels.
IV
'Sumurun,' like the 'Enfant Prodigue,' was supported by its music, which sustained the gestures and which sometimes suggested more than gesture alone can do. In the 'Enfant Prodigue,' for example, one of the most amusing scenes is that in which the elderly rich man tenders his affections to the charmer who has fascinated the Prodigal Son. She insists upon marriage. It would be difficult to convey this idea in pure pantomime. So she points to the fourth finger of the left hand, and the orchestra plays the familiar Wedding March, thus instantly conveying the idea. When she goes off to get her bonnet, the elderly suitor repeats her gesture, and the orchestra repeats the Wedding March, whereupon he winks and shakes his head, giving us clearly to understand that his intentions are strictly dishonorable.
'Sumurun' is rather a spectacle than a play; and therefore it makes comparatively little use of the conventionalized gestures which may be described as the accepted vocabulary of pantomime, and which have been developed by the followers of Noverre in France and in Italy. This vocabulary of gesture is only a codification of the signs which we naturally make—shaking the head for "no," nodding for "yes," and laying a finger on the lips for "hush!" The basis of any such vocabulary must be the series of gestures by the aid of which man has always expressed his emotions. This is why the traditional gestures of theatrical pantomime do not, and indeed cannot, differ greatly from any natural sign language. The universality of this pantomimic vocabulary was curiously evidenced forty years ago when Morlacchi, the Italian dancer, married Texas Jack, the American scout. She had been trained in pantomime at La Scala, in Milan, and he had acquired the sign language of the Plains Indians. And they found that they could hold converse with each other in pantomime, she using the Italian-French gestures and he employing the gestures of the redskins.
(1912.)
XIITHE IDEAL OF THE ACROBAT
THE IDEAL OF THE ACROBATI
WhenHuckleberry Finn went to the circus he sneaked in under the tent when the watchman was absent. He had money in his pocket, but he feared that he might need this. "I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses," he confessed, "when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use inwastingit on them." In spite of the fact that he had not paid for his seat, and that he was thereby released from the necessity of getting his money's worth, he declared cheerfully that "it was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was, when they all come riding in, two and two, a gentleman and a lady, side by side, the men just in their drawers and undershirts, and no shoes nor stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs, easy and comfortable ... and every lady with a lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking like a gang of real sure-enough queens.... And then, one by one, they got up and stood, and went a-weaving around the ring so gentle and wavy and graceful, the men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent roof, and every lady's rose-leaf dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking like the most loveliest parasol."
However much Huck was impressed by the Grand Entry, he seems to have been more pleased by the surprising act, traditionally known as 'Pete Jenkins,' and never better described than by Mark Twain's youthful hero. "And by and by a drunk man tried to get into the ring—said he wanted to ride; said he could ride as well as anybody that ever was. They argued and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn't listen, and the whole show came to a standstill. Then the people began to holler at him and make fun of him.... So then the ring-master he made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn't be no disturbance, and if the man would promise he wouldn't make no more trouble, he would let him ride, if he thought he could stay on the horse.... The minute he was on the horse he began to rip and tear and jump and cavort around ... the drunk man hanging onto his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump.... But pretty soon he struggled up astraddle and grabbed the bridle, a-reeling this way and that; and the next minute he sprung up and stood! and the horse a-going like a house afire, too. He just stood there, a-sailing around as easy and as comfortable as if he warn't ever drunk in his life—and then he begun to pull off his clothes and sling them. He shed them so thick they kind of clogged up the air, and altogether he shed seventeen suits. And then, here he was, slim and handsome, and dressed the grandiest and prettiest you ever saw, and he lit into that horse and made him hum—and finally skipped off and made his bow and danced off to the dressing-room, and everybody just a-howling with pleasure and astonishment. Then the ring-master, he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody!"
Yet in this enjoyment of a practical joke, dear to every boy's heart, Huck did not fail to note that the skilful rider who had pretended to be intoxicated, stood up at last, "slim and handsome." Even Huck Finn, neglected son of the town-drunkard, was quick to respond to the appeal of the supple and well-proportioned figure of the rider after the superimposed clothing had been discarded, just as he had felt the attraction of the varied colors and the graceful evolutions of the Grand Entry. At bottom, it was the beauty of the display that he appreciated most keenly. By the side of this passage from Mark Twain's masterpiece may be set a passage from Mr. Hamlin Garland's best story, 'Rose of Dutcher's Coolly,' in which we find recorded the impressions of a girl of about the same age, the daughter of a hard-working Wisconsin farmer. Rose had never seen a circus before, and even the morning street parade fired her imagination.
"On they came, a band leading the way. Just behind, with glitter of lance and shine of helmet, came a dozen knights and fair ladies riding spirited chargers. They all looked strange and haughty, and sneeringly indifferent to the cheers of the people. The women seemed small and firm and scornful, and the men rode with lances uplifted, looking down at the crowd with a haughty droop in their eyelids." Rose "did not laugh at the clown jigging by in a pony-cart, for there was a face between her and all that followed—the face of a bare-armed knight, with brown hair and a curling mustache, whose proud neck had a curve in it as he bent his head to speak to his rearing horse.... His face was fine, like pictures she had seen."
In the afternoon Rose attended the performance in the tent and "sat in a dream of delight as the band began to play.... Then the music struck into a splendid gallop and out from the curtained mysteries beyond, the knights and ladies darted, two by two, in glory of crimson and gold, and green and silver. At their head rode the man with the brown mustache." A little later "six men dressed in tights of blue and white and orange ran into the ring, and her hero led them. He wore blue and silver, and on his breast was a rosette. He looked a god to her. His naked limbs, his proud neck, the lofty carriage of his head, made her shiver with emotion. They all came to her, lit by the white radiance; they were not naked, they were beautiful.... They invested their nakedness with something which exalted them. They became objects of luminous beauty to her, tho she knew nothing of art. To see him bow and kiss his fingers to the audience was a revelation of manly grace and courtesy." When at last the show was over and Rose went out into the open air, "it seemed strange to see the same blue sky arching the earth; things seemed exactly the same, and yet Rose had grown older. She had developed immeasurably in those few hours." As they looked back at the tents, Rose knew that "something sweet and splendid and mystical was passing out of her life after a few hours' stay there. Her feeling of loss was none the less real because it was indefinable to her."
She never saw this acrobat again, and after a little while she knew that she did not want to see him. He lingered in her memory, a vision from another world than any she had ever dreamed—a world of heroic romance and of lofty idealism. "She began to live for him, her ideal. She set him on high as a being to be worshiped, as a man fit to be her judge. In the days and weeks which followed she asked herself: 'Would he like me to do this?' When the sunset was very beautiful, she thought of him.... Vast ambitions began in her.... She would do something great for his sake.... In short, she consecrated herself to him as to a king, and seized upon every chance to educate herself to be worthy of him." And while her soul was thus expanding under the influence of this poetic idealization of a manly figure revealed to her only for two or three hours, all unconsciously she patterned her movements upon his. She walked with a free stride, and her body came to have the easy carriage of the athlete. Later, when Rose had matured into a beauty of her own, she confessed to an elder woman this sentimental awakening in her early girlhood; and it became evident to her friend that "the beautiful poise of the head, and supple swing of the girl's body was in part due to the suggestion of the man's perfect grace."
II
To the realistic imagination of the boy, Huck, the circus was a fleeting spectacle of beauty; and to the romantic imagination of the girl, Rose, it lingered long as a dream of poetry. Young Americans, both of them, living in these modern days when the human form, male and female, is decorously dissembled and disguised by ugly and complicated garments, they had been allowed by the exceptional freedom of the circus to recapture something of the frank and innocent delight of the Greeks in the beauty of the body, in its beauty merely as a body, and not as the habitation of the mind and the soul. Alert as the Greeks were to admire the deeds of the mind—no race ever more so—they were no less keen in their appreciation of the things of the body. They were glad to crown the poet for his lyric conquest, but they bestowed the laurel wreath also on the athlete who had won to the front in the race. The lofty nobility of their tragedy testifies to the clarity of their intelligence; and the supreme power of their sculpture is evidence of their loving study of the human body, bearing itself in beauty, clad in few and flowing garments which allowed the eye to follow the free play of the muscles.
It is only in the circus or the gymnasium or the swimming-pool that we moderns are permitted to behold what was a daily spectacle to the Greeks; and it is because the circus preserves for us this occasional privilege that it deserves to survive. The jocularities of the clowns, the intricate evolutions of the trained animals, the golden glitter of the gorgeous cavalcades—all these are but the casual accompaniments of the essential privilege of the circus to present to us a succession of men and women, with their bodies in perfect condition, to exhibit to us that purely physical beauty which we are ever in danger of overlooking or even forgetting. These acrobats, slim and handsome, as Huck Finn found them, in their "shirts and drawers," may display their daring and their grace, standing on a circling steed or swinging from a flying trapeze, revolving on a horizontal bar or building themselves up into human pyramids on the bark of the arena; but, except for the sake of variety, the way in which they may choose to exhibit their skill and to show themselves is unimportant. What is important is that we may have the shifting spectacle of the human body in the highest condition of physical efficiency, delighting our eyes by obedience to the everlasting laws of beauty.
While the Greeks had far more opportunities than are vouchsafed to us moderns to behold the human body exhibiting its strength and its skill in graceful play, we have the advantage that many of the most effective exercises are latter-day inventions. It seems unlikely that the Athenians and the Spartans, even tho they were horsemen, had attained to the art of bareback riding; they may have bestraddled a saddleless steed, but they had not learned how to stand on his back, and to turn somersets in time with the stride of the horse. It is, of course, possible that they were familiar with this, but no sculpture and no vase-painting, no anecdote in the works of the prose-writers, and no line of the lyrists survives to authorize us to believe it. And it is fairly certain, also, that they lacked the horizontal bar, which affords limitless possibilities to the adventurous acrobat of our own times, both when it is erected singly and when it is combined in sets of three, either fixed in the arena or raised aloft in the air to produce the appearance of a remoter ethereality.
The trapeze has a name of Greek origin, and it was possibly known to the Greeks. But the Greeks did not foresee the full possibilities of the trapeze, since its most startling utilization, the feat known as the Flying Trapeze, was invented by the French acrobat, Léotard, only a little later than the middle of the nineteenth century. The Flying Trapeze is the ultimate achievement of acrobatic art, and it demands the utmost combination of skilful strength and of easy grace. It was a feat that the Greeks would have appreciated and enjoyed, since it demanded and disclosed the perfection of physical courage and of physical skill. Of late, the Flying Trapeze has been complicated and doubled in difficulty by the introduction of a second performer, who at first makes the leap simultaneously with his partner, and afterward separates from him and springs thru the air to the trapeze which his associate has just abandoned, the pair thus floating past each other in mid-air. In this more elaborated form the task is more perilous, no doubt, and far less easy of accomplishment; but it cannot be achieved with quite the same graceful mastery as when a single performer seems to glide ethereally from bar to bar, as tho it was impossible for him to fall or to fail to catch his almost invisible support. This graceful mastery was the most marked characteristic of Léotard, the original inventor of the Flying Trapeze; and it may be doubted whether any of those who have followed the path he traced thru the air, and who have vanquished difficulties beyond those which he conquered, have been able to outdo him in the abiding essential of grace.
III
The overcoming of difficulty is one of the elements of the pleasure which we take in any art, and part of our enjoyment of a sonnet, for example, must be ascribed to the apparent ease with which the poet is able to express his thought, amply and completely, within the rigid limitations of his fourteen lines, with their prescribed arrangement of five or six rimes. But our delight is diminished if we are made conscious of the effort it has cost the artist to attain his aim. Many a later performer on the Flying Trapeze let us see that the feats he is attempting are so difficult that they cannot be accomplished without obvious effort. That is to say, we are made aware that the acrobat is exhibiting a "stunt," and this is bad art. Difficulty overcome is worth while only when it is overcome seemingly without any strain, and when art is sufficient to conceal itself. However difficult the artist's achievement may be, its charm is doubled if he can make it appear to be easy.
It happens that I am able to bring his personal testimony to the fact that this was the principle which always governed Léotard himself. When the French gymnast paid his only visit to the United States, more than forty years ago, he used to practise in a gymnasium which I also frequented. He spoke no English, and I had a little school-boy French, so that a certain intimacy sprang up. One day Léotard asked me to swing a trapeze for him, and he sprang off and caught it with a single hand, and then as the second trapeze returned he twisted and grasped the first trapeze again with one hand. This evoked from me an immediate exclamation of astonishment and admiration at the startling conquest of difficulty, and it was followed by the natural question why so extraordinary a feat had never been exhibited in public. Léotard explained that the leaps from trapeze to trapeze with the aid of one hand only must be lopsided, since the body is inevitably more or less twisted, and he added that as there was an unavoidable and ungraceful wrenching of the person, he had determined never to exhibit this feat in public, difficult as it might be.
But altho Léotard was not willing to perform in public with only one hand, it was a most invaluable exercise in private. His ability to accomplish his leaps thus handicapped gave him a redoubled confidence when he was using both of his hands. That he was right in resisting the temptation to startle the spectators by a "stunt" of surprising difficulty is beyond question. It could not be made to seem easy, and it could not be accomplished with grace. Therefore it was not fit for exhibition, even tho Léotard might feel sure that he could do it without risk of failure. Here the French acrobat revealed himself as bound by the eternal principles which underlie all the arts, that of the acrobat no less than those of the painter and the poet. There is lack of art in the performances of many acrobats of remarkable skill, who attempt feats which they are not always certain of achieving. Indeed, they are sometimes willing to profit by this very uncertainty. They fail the first time of trying, and even the second, and these failures serve the purpose of advertising to the spectators the difficulty of the task they have undertaken. Then the third time, or the fourth, they succeed, whereupon they reap the unworthy reward of applause from the unthinking.
The artist should never let us see his failures. If he is not certain that he can perform what he promises, then he had better refrain from the attempt. It was in the same winter that Léotard was in New York, in the late sixties of the nineteenth century, that the Hanlon Brothers paid one of their welcome visits to America. The Hanlons they were then, and they were acrobats pure and simple, altho later, when they called themselves the Hanlon-Lees, they had become pantomimists. As acrobats they held fast to the same principles which governed Léotard in his performances. They insisted upon certainty of execution; they never failed to perform the feat they set out to accomplish, and to perform it successfully the first time they attempted it. And no matter how difficult the feat might be, or how novel or how effective, if they could not attain absolute certainty of execution, they refrained from setting it before the public. I was told at the time that there were two or three surprising and alluring exercises which the Hanlons had invented themselves, which they practised laboriously and faithfully all that winter, and which they wisely refrained from ever putting on their program because they were never able to assure themselves of a uniformly successful result. They could do any one of these feats four times out of five, but the fifth time there would be a miscalculation of energy, and the attempt would have to be repeated. And they were unwilling to let the public witness any performance of theirs which was not perfect in its execution.
IV
Here again the modern acrobat, who is guided by a real feeling for his art, is in accord with the principles which the Greeks obeyed. In Attic tragedy, for example, there are no exhibitions of violence, no scuffles, and no assassinations, and this is not so much because the Greeks shrank from scenes of blood, as some critics have vainly contended, but rather because the actors in the Attic drama were raised on thick boots and were topped by towering masks, which made it almost impossible for them to take part in episodes of vigorous action, in hand-to-hand struggles, in murders before the eyes of the spectators, without danger of displacing the mask, and thereby distracting the attention of the audience from the immediate purpose of the dramatic poet. What could not be done gracefully the Greeks refrained from attempting. The exhibition of difficulty for the sake of difficulty, still more the failure to accomplish a "stunt" for the sake of calling attention to its difficulty—these things the Greeks abhorred. They would as surely have disapproved of the misguided artifices of the acrobats who make a practise of failing once or twice in order to multiply the immediate effect of their ultimate success as they would reprove the exhibition of a difficulty conquered for its own sake. It is only in the best acrobatic performances that we moderns are privileged to perceive what was a constant delight to the Greeks—the beauty of the human form, in its finest physical perfection, certain of its strength and easy in its grace.
(1912.)
XIIITHE DECLINE AND FALL OFNEGRO-MINSTRELSY
THE DECLINE AND FALLOF NEGRO-MINSTRELSYI
Ofall the varied and manifold kinds of theatrical entertainment negro-minstrelsy is the only one which is absolutely native to these States, and the only one which could not have come into existence anywhere else in the civilized world. Here in America alone has the transplanted African been brought into intimate contact with the transplanted European. Other nations may have disputed our claim to the invention of the steamboat and the telegraph, but negro-minstrelsy is as indisputably due to American inventiveness as the telephone itself. Here in the United States it had its humble beginnings; here it expanded and flourished for many years; from here it was exported to Great Britain, where it established itself for many seasons; from here it has made sporadic excursions into France and into Germany; and here at last it has fallen into a decline and a degeneracy and a decay which seem to doom it to a speedy extinction. Its life was little longer than that vouchsafed to man, threescore years and ten, for it was born in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, and in the second decade of the twentieth it lingers superfluous on the stage, with none to do it reverence.
Time was when the negro minstrels held possession of three or four theaters in the single city of New York, and when a dozen or more troops were traveling from town to town; and now they have long ago surrendered their last hall in the metropolis, and only a solitary company winds its lonely way from theater to theater thruout the United States. The few surviving practitioners of the art are reduced to the presentation of brief interludes in the all-devouring variety-shows, or to the impersonation of sparse negro characters in occasional comedies. The Skidmore Guards, who paraded so gaily at Harrigan and Hart's, are disbanded now these many years; Johnny Wild of joyous memory is no more, and Sweatnam, bereft of his fellows in sable drollery, is seen only in a chance comedy like 'Excuse Me,' or the 'County Chairman.' George Christy and Dan Emmett and Dan Bryant have gone and left only fading memories of their breezy songs, their nimble dances, and their flippant quips. Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth blacked up more than once, Joseph Jefferson and Barney Williams besmeared themselves with burnt cork on occasion; but it is not by these darker episodes in their artistic careers that they are now recalled, and the leading actors of to-day think scorn of negro-minstrelsy—whenever they deign to give it a thought. And yet it must be noted frankly that when The Lambs wanted to raise money for their new club-house, they did not disdain the art of the negro minstrel, and more than twoscore of them went forth to conquer, willingly disguised in the uniform blackness assumed long ago by George Christy and Dan Bryant.
It is to be hoped that some devoted historian will come forward before it is too late and tell us the history of this very special form of theatrical art, the only one indigenous to our soil. Indeed, now that our American universities are paying attention to the drama, what more alluring theme for the dissertation demanded of all candidates for the doctorate of philosophy than an inquiry into the rise and fall of negro-minstrelsy? In the late Laurence Hutton's conscientious and entertaining volume on the 'Curiosities of the American Stage,' there is a chapter in which the subject is treated historically, altho the chronicler wasted much of his precious space in considering the succession of sable characters in the regular drama—Shakspere's Othello, Southerne's Oroonoko, Bickerstaff's Mungo, Boucicault's Pete (in the 'Octoroon'), Uncle Tom, Topsy, Eliza, and their companions (in the undying dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's story). These were all parts in plays wherein white characters were prominent. The first performer of a song-and-dance, that is of a sketch in which the darky performer was sufficient unto himself, and was deprived of any support from persons of another complexion, seems to have been "Jim Crow" Rice—the title of whose lively lyric survives in the name bestowed upon the cars reserved for colored folk on certain Southern railroads. Rice found his pattern in an old negro who did a peculiar step after he had sung to a tune of his own contriving:
Wheel about, turn about;Do jus' so:An' ebery time I turn about,I jump Jim Crow.
Rice carried Jim Crow to England, and he made a specialty of dandy darkies. But he was not the discoverer of negro-minstrelsy, as we know it, altho he blazed the trail for it. Indeed, it was quite probably due to the influence of Rice and his darky dandies that the negro minstrels confined their efforts to the imitation of the town negro rather than of the plantation negro, the field-hand of the Uncle Remus type. Rice first impersonated Jim Crow in the late twenties, and it was in the middle of the thirties that he went to England. And it was in the early forties that Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Billy Whitlock, and Dick Pelham happened to meet by accident in a New York boarding-house, and amused themselves with songs accompanied by the banjo, the tambourine, and the bones. Pleased by the result of their exercises, they appeared together at a benefit, and negro-minstrelsy was born. At first there was no differentiation into Interlocutors and End-men; they all took an equal share in the more or less improvised dialog; they sang, and they played, and they danced the 'Essence of Old Virginny.'
Probably Emmett began early to provide new tunes for them. He was the composer of 'Old Dan Tucker' and the 'Boatman's Dance,' of 'Walk Along, John,' and 'Early in the Morning,' and one walk-around which he devised in the late fifties for Bryant's Minstrels, 'Dixie,' was introduced by Mrs. John Wood into a burlesque, which she was playing in New Orleans, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The sentiment and the tune took the fancy of the ardent Louisianans, and they carried it with them into the Confederate army, where it soon established itself as the war-song of the South. And then when Richmond had fallen at last, Lincoln ordered the bands of the victorious army to play 'Dixie,' with the wise explanation that as we had captured the Southern capital, we had also captured the Southern song. And 'Dixie,' which had begun life so humbly as a walk-around in a minstrel-show in New York, bids fair to survive indefinitely as the musical testimony to the fact that the cruel war is over, and that these States are now one nation.
II
It was only a year or two after the quartet of Emmett, Brower, Whitlock, and Pelham had shown the possibilities of the new form of amusement that troops of negro minstrels began to supply an entire evening's amusement. The regulation First Part was devised with its curving row of vocalists, instrumentalists, and comedians. The dignified Interlocutor took his place in the middle of the semicircle, and uttered the time-honored phrase: "Gentlemen, be seated. We will commence with the overture." Bones captured the chair at one end, and Tambo pre-empted that on the other; and they began their wordy skirmish with the Middleman, in which that pompous presiding officer always got the worst of it. This device for immediate and boisterous laughter, this putting down of the Middleman by the End-man, the negro minstrels appear to have borrowed from the circus, where the clown is also permitted always to discomfit the stiff and stately ring-master.
But altho the minstrels may have taken over this effective trick from the circus, with which some of the earlier performers had had intimate relations, the trick itself is of remote antiquity. The side-splitting colloquy of the End-man with the Middleman may be exactly like the interchange of merry jests between the clown and the ring-master, yet it is far older than the modern circus. It existed in Paris, for example, in the sixteenth century, when the quack doctor was accompanied by his jack-pudding. Many of the dialogs heard on the Pont-Neuf between Mondor and Tabarin have been preserved, and the method is precisely that of the dialogs between ring-master and clown, Interlocutor and End-man, even to the persistent repetition of the question which contains the catch. "Master," Tabarin would begin, "can you tell me which is the more generous, a man or a woman?" And the quack doctor would solemnly reply: "Ah, Tabarin, that is a question which has been greatly debated by the philosophers of antiquity, and they have been unable to decide which is truly the more generous, a man or a woman." Then Tabarin would briskly retort: "Never mind the old philosophers. I can tell you." And with great contempt the ponderous quack doctor would return: "What, Tabarin, do you mean to say that you can tell us which is the more generous, a man or a woman." Tabarin promptly responded that he could. "Then," asked Mondor, "pray do so. Which is the more generous, a man or a woman?" And thereupon, to the great disgust of Mondor, Tabarin would proffer his ribald explanation. Unfortunately the explanation he gave is frankly too ribald to be given here, for nowadays we are more squeamish than the idlers who gathered around the quack doctor's platform in Paris three or four centuries ago. The dialogs of Mondor and Tabarin were brief enough, but they often made up for their brevity in their breadth.
This kind of catch-question was known in England, under Elizabeth, as "selling a bargain," and it is not infrequent in the plays of the time. It will be found more than once in earlier plays of Shakspere; for example, when his "clowns" (as the low-comedy characters were then called) were allowed to run on at their own sweet will. Not a little of the dialog of the two Dromios is closely akin in its method to the interchange of question and answer between the Interlocutor and the End-man. We may be sure this method of evoking laughter was employed also by the improvising comedians of the Italian comedy-of-masks, with which negro-minstrelsy has other points of resemblance. It must have been popular with the wandering glee-men of the rude Middle Ages; and now that negro-minstrelsy is disappearing and now that our circuses have burgeoned into three rings under a tent too vast for any merely verbal repartees, it has not departed from among us, since it still survives as the staple of the so-called "sidewalk conversationalists" who swap personalities in our superabundant variety-shows.
We do not know with historic certainty how soon the First Part crystallized into the form which has long been traditional—the opening overture, the catch-questioning of End-man and Middleman, the comic songs of Bones and Tambo in turn, the sentimental ballads by the silver-throated vocalists, and the concluding walk-around. The rest of the evening's entertainment never took on any definite framework, altho the final item on the program was likely to be a piece of some length, often a burlesque of a serious drama then popular, and this little play "enlisted the whole strength of the company." Between the stately First Part and the more pretentious terminating sketch, the minstrels presented a variety of acts in which the several members exhibited their specialities. A clog-dance was always in order—altho the mechanical precision of this form of saltatorial exercise was wholly foreign to the characteristics of the actual negroes whom the minstrels were supposed to be representing. A stump-speech was certain of a warm reception—altho this again departed from the true negro tradition, and, in fact, often degenerated into frank burlesque, wholly unrelated to the realities of life. Sketches, like those which Rice had earlier composed for his own acting, were likely to have a little closer relation to the genuine darky.
Yet here again the negro minstrel was not avid of overt originality. He was willing to find his profit in the past and to translate into negro dialect any farce, however ancient, which might contain comic situations or humorous characters that could be twisted to suit his immediate purpose. He seized upon the ingenious plots of certain of the pantomimes brought to America from France half a century ago by the Ravels. And on occasion he went, unwittingly, still further afield for his prey. There is in print, in a collection of so-called Ethiopian drama, an amusing sketch, entitled the 'Great Mutton Trial'; and the remote source of this is to be sought in the oldest and best farce which has survived in French literature. 'Maître Pierre Pathelin' is now acted occasionally by the Comédie-Française in Paris, in a version which preserves its original flavor; but in the eighteenth century an adaptation, made by Brueys and Palaprat, and called the 'Avocat Pathelin,' was popular. It was this later perversion which served as the basis of an English farce, entitled the 'Village Lawyer,' and the 'Great Mutton Trial' is simply the 'Village Lawyer' transmogrified to suit the bolder and more robust methods of the negro minstrels.
III
And here we may discover the real reason why negro-minstrelsy failed to establish itself. It neglected its opportunity to devote itself primarily to its own peculiar field—the humorous reproduction of the sayings and doings of the colored man in the United States. To represent the negro in his comic aspects and in his sentimental moods was what the minstrels pretended to do; but the pretense was often only a hollow mockery. Even the musical instruments they affected, the banjo and the bones, were not as characteristic of the field-hand, or even of the town darky, as the violin. Indeed, the bones cannot be considered as in any way special to the negro; they were familiar to Shakspere's Bottom, who declared: "I have a reasonable good ear in music; let us have the tongs and the bones." And the wise recorder of the words and deeds of Uncle Remus asserted that he had never listened to the staccato picking of a banjo in the negro-quarters of any plantation.
"I have seen the negro at work," so Harris once stated, "and I have seen him at play; I have attended his corn-shuckings, his dances, and his frolics; I have heard him give the wonderful melody of his songs to the winds; I have heard him give barbaric airs to the quills" (that is to say, to the Pan-pipes); "I have heard him scrape jubilantly on the fiddle; I have seen him blow wildly on the bugle, and beat enthusiastically on the triangle; but I have never heard him play on the banjo." Mr. George W. Cable thereupon came forward with his evidence to the effect that, altho the banjo was to be found occasionally on a plantation, it was far less frequently seen than the violin. It will be noted that Harris was speaking of the Georgian negro, and that Mr. Cable was talking about the negro in Louisiana; and perhaps the true habitat of the banjo is to be found farther north and near to the border States. At any rate, there is a footnote to one of Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on Virginia' (published in 1784), which informs us that the instrument proper to the slaves of the Old Dominion is "the banjar, which they brought hither from Africa, and which is the origin of the guitar, its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the guitar."
Now and again some one negro minstrel did make a serious study of a negro type; such a performer was J. W. McAndrews, the "Watermelon Man." But the most of them were content to be comic without any effort to catch the special comicality of the darky; and sometimes they strayed so completely from the path as to indulge in songs in an alleged Irish brogue or in a dislocated German dialect. Now, nothing could well be conceived more incongruously inartistic than a white man blacked up into the semblance of a negro, and then impertinently caroling an impudent Irish lyric. Yet the general neglect of the opportunities for a more accurate presentation of negro characteristics is to be seen in the strange fact that the minstrels failed to perceive the possible popularity of rag-time tunes, and failed also to put the cake-walk on the stage. Even at the height of its vogue in the mid years of the nineteenth century, negro-minstrelsy did not occupy its own field, and did not try to raise therein the varied flowers of which they had the seed.
Instead of cultivating the tempting possibilities which lay before them, and devoting themselves to a loving delineation of the colored people who make up a tenth of our population, they turned aside to devote themselves to the spectacular elaboration of their original entertainment. The clog-dances became most intricate and more mechanical—and thereby still more remote from the buck-and-wing dancing of the real negro. The First Part was presented with accompaniments of Oriental magnificence and of variegated glitter. The chorus was enlarged; the musicians were multiplied; the End-men operated in relays; and at last the bass-drum which towered aloft over Haverly's Mastodon Minstrels bore the boastful legend: "40. Count Them. 40." And when the suspicious spectator obeyed this command, he discovered to his surprise that the vaunt was more than made good since he had a full view of at least half a dozen performers in addition to the promised twoscore.
At the apex of his inflated prosperity Haverly invaded Germany with his mastodonic organization; and one result of his visit was probably still further to confuse the Teutonic misinformation about the American type, which seems often to be a curious composite photograph of the red men of Cooper, the black men of Mrs. Stowe, and the white men of Mark Twain and Bret Harte. And it was reported at the time that another and more immediate result of this rash foray beyond the boundaries of the English-speaking race was that Haverly was, for a while, in danger of arrest by the police for a fraudulent attempt to deceive the German public, because he was pretending to present a company ofnegrominstrels, whereas his performers were actually white men!
It should be recorded that while the vogue lasted, there did come into existence sundry troops of minstrels whose members were all of them actually colored men, altho they conformed to the convention set by those whom they were imitating and conscientiously disguised themselves with burnt cork, to achieve the sable uniformity temporarily attained by the ordinary negro minstrels. Perhaps the most obvious parallel of the blacking up of veritable colored men to follow the example of the white men who pretended to imitate the negro is to be found in the original performance of 'As You Like It,' on the Elizabethan stage, when the shaven boy-actor who impersonated Rosalind disguised himself as a lad, and then had to pretend to Orlando that he was a girl.
IV
For the decline and fall of negro-minstrelsy it is easy to find more than one sufficient explanation. First of all, it may have been due to its failure to devote itself lovingly to the representation of the many peculiarities of the negro himself. Second, it is possible that negro-minstrelsy had an inherent and inevitable disqualification for enduring popularity, in that it was exclusively masculine and necessarily deprived of the potent attractiveness exerted by the members of the more fascinating sex. And in the third place, its program was rather limited and monotonous, and therefore negro-minstrelsy could not long withstand the competition of the music-hall, of the variety-show, and of the comic musical pieces, which satisfied more amply the exactly similar taste of the public for broad fun commingled with song and dance.
Whatever the precise cause may be, there is no denying that negro-minstrelsy is on the verge of extinction, however much we may bewail the fact. It failed to accomplish its true purpose, and it is disappearing, leaving behind it little that is worthy of preservation except a few of its songs. This, at least, it has to its credit—that it gave Stephen Collins Foster the chance to produce his simple melodies. Perhaps we might even venture to assert that the existence of negro-minstrelsy is justified by a single one of these songs—by 'Old Folks at Home,' which has a wailing melancholy and an unaffected pathos, lacking in the earlier and more saccharine 'Home, Sweet Home,' which the English composer, Bishop, based on an old Sicilian tune. After Foster came Root and Work, and 'My Old Kentucky Home' was succeeded by 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching,' and by 'Marching thru Georgia'—which last lyric now shares its popularity only with 'Dixie' as a musical relic of the Civil War.
It would be pleasant to know whether it was one of Foster's songs, and which one it may have been that once touched the tender heart of Thackeray. "I heard a humorous balladist not long since," the novelist recorded, "a minstrel with wool on his head, and an ultra Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. They have gazed at dozens of tragedy-queens dying on the stage and expiring in appropriate blank verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. They have looked up, with deep respect be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo, sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity."
(1912.)
XIVTHE UTILITY OF THE VARIETY-SHOW
THE UTILITY OF THE VARIETY-SHOWI
Inan advertisement issued by one of the huge department stores of New York not long ago, the assertion was made that the house had on sale "all the new novelties." A purist in language might be moved to protest that this proclamation was plainly tautological, because it is the essential quality of every novelty to be new. But even a purist in language, if he happens also to be an honest observer of things as they are, would be forced to admit that his supercilious cavil had only a superficial justification, since, as a matter of fact, there are many novelties which are not new, and which, indeed, are venerably ancient. It was Solomon, superabundantly married, and therefore in an excellent position to acquire wisdom, who declared that there is nothing new under the sun. Wireless telegraphy is only a development of the signaling by beacon-fires, which was practised by the Greeks and which they employed to convey immediately to Greece the glad tidings of the fall of Troy; and moving-pictures are only an ingenious amplification of the zoëtrope of our childhood.
The amusement-parks which sprang up all over the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, in imitation of those at Coney Island, bear an undeniable resemblance to the Foire Saint Laurent and to the other fairs of Paris in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even the loud-voiced crier who proclaims the merits of the several side-shows, and who is now known as a "barker," bears a name which is only a translation of that given to his forbears two hundred years ago in France—aboyeur.
The so-called cabaret-shows, prevalent in the larger cities of the United States in the winter of 1911-1912, were hailed as the very latest form of amusement, combining as they did the solid pleasures of the table with the ethereal delights of song-and-dance; and yet Froissart is a witness that something very like the cabaret-show was known in the Middle Ages, and Gibbon has recorded its existence nearly a thousand years earlier, at the court of Theodoric. Indeed, the Romans, and the Greeks before them, had employed performers of one sort or another to relieve the monotony of their banquets. Gaditanian dancers were popular thruout the wide realm of Rome, almost two thousand years before Carmencita came from Cadiz to warble and caper at midnight in the studios of American painters, just before and just after the guests had enjoyed the refreshments provided by their artistic hosts.
As the cabaret-show is only another form of the well-known "vaudeville supper," it must be relegated to the class of novelties which are not new. And vaudeville itself is only the long familiar variety-show. It may now be called by a new name, and many of those who do not look behind a label may accept it as a new thing; nevertheless it is very old, indeed. The name "vaudeville" is an absurd misnomer, like so many other terms due to our habit of careless borrowing from other tongues. In Frenchvaudevilleoriginally designated a kind of topical song, bristling with pointed gibes at the follies of the moment; and then in time it took on another meaning, when it was used to describe a light and lively farce interspersed with occasional lyrics set to old-fashioned tunes. It is impossible to say just how and why this French word, which had two distinct meanings in its own language, should have been imported into English to characterize improperly a form of amusement which we had long known by the admirably exact name of variety-show. The French themselves call their own type of variety-show, at which refreshments are served, acafé-concert. Their nickname for it is abeuglant, a place where there is "howling"—which seems to imply that they do not expect too much melody from the singers, who appear at these performances. In England an establishment of this kind is called a music-hall; and it was more than half a century ago that Planché described their blatant lyrics set to brazen tunes as "most music-hall, most melancholy."
Whatever its name may be in the different parts of the world, the entertainment is much the same. The most frequent item on the program is the comic song, often accompanied by a rudimentary dance. Sometimes it is in the martial staccato of Paulus's 'En revenant de la révue' which boosted General Boulanger into a furious but fleeting political popularity. Sometimes it is the coonful melody of 'Under the Bamboo Tree' or 'Dinah, the Moon am Shining.' Sometimes it is an almost epileptic lyric, like 'Tarara-boom-de-ay.' Sometimes a singer of a more delicate art, like Yvette Guilbert, ventures upon songs of a more subtly sentimental appeal. There may be a swift succession of solos, male singers and female alternating, those of the most fame appearing latest, as is the practise in the first part of the Parisian open-aircafé-chantant, the Alcazar or the Ambassadeurs. There may be duets or trios or quartets, serious or comic, decorously unadorned or diversified by dancing. There may be songs to be interpreted by half a dozen performers, accompanied by more or less dramatic action, like the 'Mulligan Guards,' which was the simple germ wherefrom sprouted the long series of more and more elaborate Harrigan and Hart plays, delineating with keen insight and with sympathetic humor the manifold aspects of tenement-house life in New York, and possessing a rich flavor of fun curiously akin to that which amuses us in the plays wherein Plautus had sketched the tenement-house life in Rome two thousand years ago.
While the song and the song-and-dance and the song-and-parade may be the staple of the entertainment, the variety-show justifies its name by the medley of other exhibitions it presents. It delights in the dance unaccompanied by the song; and in some of the English music-halls, the Alhambra and the Empire in London, the ballet is the foremost attraction, providing an opportunity for the display of her dainty art to so exquisite a dancer as Mlle. Genée. In New York it is now a refuge for the waifs and strays of vanishing negro-minstrelsy. It is ready to welcome the wandering conjurer and the strolling juggler. It extends its hospitality to the acrobat, single or in groups, throwing flipflaps on the stage, flying thru the air on a trapeze or diving into the water in a tank. It acts as host to the trainer of performing animals, dogs and cats, seals and elephants. It lends its stage to the puppet-show performer, to the sidewalk conversationalist, and to the ventriloquist, with his pair of stolid figures seemingly seated uncomfortably on his knees and actually supported by his hands, while his adroit fingers manipulate their mechanical mouths.
Of late, the variety-show has accepted the aid of the exhibitors of moving-pictures, just as the exhibitors of moving-pictures have invoked the casual assistance of song-and-dance teams and of other vaudeville performers to relieve the strain on the eyes of their spectators. And the introduction of the cinematograph, or the bioscope, or whatever it may be called, is, perhaps, the only real novelty in our latter-day variety-show. All the other performers are presenting feats of a kind known to our remote ancestors, even if these feats are now more skilfully presented. Animals were put thru their paces hundreds of years ago; and performing dogs and educated bears figure frequently in the illuminations which decorate many a medieval manuscript. There were tight-rope dancers in Alexandria and in Byzantium; there were contortionists in Rome and in Greece, and the flexibility of these latter is preserved for us in the vase-paintings which have been replevined from the ashes of Pompeii and the lava of Herculaneum. Quintillian tells us of the wonderful feats of certain performers on the stage in his day, "with balls, and of other jugglers whose dexterity is such that one might suppose the things which they throw from them to return of their own accord, and to fly wheresoever they are commanded." The art of modern magic has enlarged its boundaries by the aid of the modern sciences of mechanics and physics, but elementary sleights-of-hand were known to a remote antiquity, and savages always had their medicine-men and their marabouts, workers of primitive wonders to strike awe into the souls of their unsophisticated beholders. The variety-show may have the variety it vaunts itself as possessing; but to novelty it can lay little claim.
II
The constituent elements of the variety-show as we know it to-day have existed since a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary—to use the old legal phrase. The appeal of almost every one of these elements and of the variety-show as a whole is ever to the eye and to the ear, to the senses rather than to the emotions; and to the intellect it appeals even more infrequently. Its primary purpose is to afford a kaleidoscopic succession of contrasted amusements for the benefit of those who are easily satisfied by glitter of spectacle, by incessant movement, and by violent music. It is the ideal entertainment for that redoubtable entity, the Tired Business Man, who checks his brains with his overcoat, and who resents having to witness anything in the theater which might make him think. Not only does the variety-show flourish because it is exactly adjusted to the unintellectual and purely sensational likings of the Tired Business Man and to the similar tastes of his fit mate, who is fatigued because her life is idle and empty, but for his benefit also, and for hers the summer song-show and the alleged "comic opera" and the misnamed "review" have been called into existence. Indeed, it is obvious enough that most of our summer song-shows and many of our "comic operas" and "reviews" are, in reality, only more or less disguised variety-shows.
With facts as they are, there is never any excuse for quarreling. The Tired Business Man is a fact; and it is only fair that what he demands shall be supplied by caterers to the cravings of the populace. But even tho his name is legion, the Tired Business Man is to be accepted only with contemptuous toleration. He is to be endured only so long as he does not insist on imposing his likings upon others who have a more delicate perception, and who are willing to bring their brains with them when they take their places in the theater. Even in the variety-show which seems often to exist only for the pleasure of those who still linger in what one of George Eliot's wise characters aptly called "a puerile state of culture," nevertheless, we can now and again discover signs of a longing for something less void of purpose than mere spectacle. For example, it was in a variety-show that Mr. Belasco's finely imaginative dramatization of Mr. Long's 'Madame Butterfly' was set before the American public several years prior to its being adorned by the pathetic music of Puccini for the benefit of opera-goers.
In fact, it is well to remember that theopéra comiqueof the French had its humble origin in the theater of the Parisian fairs, where also we can discover the rude beginnings of that crude form of melodrama which Victor Hugo lifted into literature in 'Hernani' and 'Ruy Bias,' casting the cloth-of-gold of his splendid lyricism over the arbitrarily articulated skeleton of his violent action. It was an old negro-minstrel act, representing the rehearsal of an amateur band, that the Hanlon-Lees borrowed to amplify into a rough-and-tumble pantomime for performance in a variety-show in Paris; and this knockabout sketch proved to be the stepping-stone which enabled them soon to achieve the fantastic eccentricity of their 'Voyage en Suisse,' performed in real theaters, first in Paris and then in New York, to the joy of all who could appreciate the perfection of their art as pantomimists. And, once again, it was in a variety-show of the lowest class that Denman Thompson first appeared as 'Josh Whitcomb Among the Female Bathers,' a vulgar episode of indelicate humor, wherein, however, was contained the germ of that perennially popular play, the 'Old Homestead,' which gave a pure pleasure to countless thousands of theater-goers, season after season, for at least a quarter of a century.
When we look back over the long annals of the variety-show we cannot escape the conclusion that here is its real opportunity, its true function, and its necessary justification. For the most part, it supplies a purely sensational amusement for the unthinking; and yet it is continually serving as a nursery for the actual theater. It is thus seen to be a proving ground for the seeds of widely different dramatic species—opéra comiqueand melodrama in France, theballet d'actionin England, the rural play in the United States. It is not always conscious of its possibilities, nor does it always improve them to best advantage. Normally it provides an entertainment appealing mainly to the senses, often empty, and often unsatisfying because of its monotony. But on occasion it is capable of grasping at higher things, and of encouraging artists who will sooner or later outgrow its limitations and transfer their activities to the theaters wherein audiences are more eager for veracity of character portrayal.
III
On one side the variety-show intersects the ring of the circus and the curving line of the First Part of negro-minstrelsy, while on the other it impinges on the sphere of the more literary drama. Its existence is evidence that the show business is always the show business, no matter how manifold and dissimilar its manifestations may seem to be. The men and women who have grown up in the regular theaters are a little inclined to be scornfully jealous of the less highly esteemed performers in the variety-show, even if they themselves are occasionally tempted by the lure of high pay for hard work to condescend to vaudeville engagements. No doubt, the bill of fare set before us more often than not in the variety-show justifies this attitude on the part of the high priests of the more legitimate drama; yet they ought to be broad-minded enough to recognize merit wherever it may be found. The late John Gilbert, best of Sir Peter Teazles, and of Sir Anthony Absolutes, was not a little provoked by the praise bestowed upon Harrigan and Hart and their associates by Mr. Howells and by other critics of the acted drama, who relished the peculiar flavor of 'Squatter Sovereignty' and its companion plays. Gilbert was puzzled to discover any reason why any criticism whould be wasted on pieces which pretended to be little more than variety-show sketches. But Joseph Jefferson, a far more versatile comedian than John Gilbert, was swift to discern merit, and he was wholly free from toplofty condescension toward other forms of the histrionic art than that in which he was himself pre-eminent—perhaps, because in his youth he had often appeared as a burlesque actor, an experience which he gladly admitted to have been very valuable to him. After Jefferson had gone to see one of the nondescript pieces at Weber and Fields's music-hall, joyous spectacles commingled of song and dance, of eccentric character and of sheer fun, he was loud in his praise of the histrionic art displayed here and there in the course of the performance, declaring without hesitation that one episode, in which the two managers took part, was simply the finest piece of comic acting he had seen that whole winter. Probably the ordinary playgoers, who had flocked to be amused by this loose-jointed piece, took a somewhat apologetic attitude toward the pleasure they had received; and probably they supposed that their pleasure at the entertainment offered to them was due mainly to the pervading bustle and dazzle of the kaleidoscopic show. But Jefferson had a keener insight into the practise of the art he adorned; and he recognized at once the sheer histrionic skill which lent the illusion of life to the fantastic impossibility of the humorous situation.
Jefferson, one may venture to assert, would not have been surprised if he had learned that an American university professor of dramatic literature, whenever he came to discuss the lyrical-burlesques of Aristophanes, was in the habit of sending his whole class to Weber and Fields that his students might see for themselves the nearest modern analog to the robust fantasies of the great Greek humorist. Aristophanes was a many-sided genius; as a lyric poet of ethereal elevation he must be set by the side of Shelley; as a keen satirist of contemporary fads and foibles he must be compared with Rabelais; and as a fun-maker pure and simple, as a comic playwright, willing and able to evoke unexpected laughter by ludicrous antics, he reveals an undeniable likeness to the adroit devisers of the hodgepodge of humorous episodes represented with contagious humor by Weber and Fields. And the heterogeneous pieces which used to be produced by the two performers who devote themselves to the dislocation of the English language were outgrowths of the variety-show, from which, indeed, the two performers themselves were graduates.
It is this aspect of the variety-show, its supplying of opportunities for artistic development to ambitious performers, and its own spontaneous generation of dramatic forms capable of being lifted into literature—it is this aspect of the variety-show which would be emphasized by any competent writer undertaking to narrate its long and involved history. That no one has yet written a history of the variety-show is as surprising as that no one has yet written a history of negro-minstrelsy. The materials for such a book are accessible and abundant, since there are already richly documented accounts of the fairs of Paris and of London, in which the variety-show flourished centuries ago. There are accounts of the English concert-halls as they now exist and of the Frenchcafé-concerts. The historian will also be aided by the various treatises on the ballet, and on the circus, and on the puppet-show, with all of which forms of entertainment the variety-show has always had intimate relations.
It may be that the future historian will be moved to point out the superficial likeness between the variety-show and the Sunday issues of certain American newspapers. These Sunday newspapers are really magazines—that is to say, they occupy a position midway between journalism and literature, just as the variety-show occupies a position midway between the circus and the theater. The magazine pages of these Sunday newspapers set before their readers a very variegated bill of fare; they provide photographs of recent events—which are the equivalent of the moving-pictures of the variety-show; they contain short-stories—which are, in narrative, what the brief plays of the variety-show are in dialog and action; they abound in anecdotes and in comic sayings—which are closely akin to the utterances of the sidewalk conversationalists of the variety-show. And the variety-show itself is like journalism, in that it is a modern combination of elements of the remotest antiquity, for altho the actual newspaper is only two or three centuries old, there were always channels by which news was conveyed to the eager public. The men of Athens nearly two thousand years ago were glad to hear and to tell some new thing, and their wants were supplied, even if there was in classical antiquity and in the Middle Ages no organization faintly anticipating the marvelous machinery for collecting and distributing information possessed by the newspapers of the twentieth century.
(1912.)
XVTHE METHOD OF MODERN MAGIC
THE METHOD OF MODERN MAGICI
"Autobiography,"said Longfellow—altho the remark does not seem especially characteristic of this gentle poet—"is what biography ought to be." And in the long list of alluring autobiographies, from Cellini's and Cibber's, from Franklin's and Goldoni's, there are few more fascinating than the 'Confidences of a Prestidigitator' of Robert-Houdin. A hostile critic of Robert-Houdin's career has recorded the fact—if it is a fact—that Robert-Houdin once confided to a fellow magician that his autobiography had been written for him by a clever Parisian journalist; and it must be admitted that not a few amusing French autobiographies have not been the children of their putative parents—for instance, the memoirs of Vidocq, the detective. Yet this is not as damaging an admission as it may seem at first sight since the clever Parisian journalist may have been little more than the amanuensis of the prestidigitator, hired only to give literary form to the actual recollections of his employer. Such a proceeding would not deprive Robert-Houdin's autobiography by its authenticity. It remains a classic, beloved by all who joy in the delights of conjuring. Unfortunately the hostile critic has gone further in his attack upon Robert-Houdin's reputation, and he has succeeded in showing that the renowned French conjurer claimed as his own invention not a few illusions which had been already exhibited by his predecessors in the art of deception.
Yet this unjustified boasting does not invalidate Robert-Houdin's title to be considered the father of modern magic. Even if he was treading in the path of those who had gone before, he attained at last to a consistent theory of the art, far in advance of that held by earlier magicians. Many of his marvels, and perhaps more than one of the most striking of them, may have been but improvements upon effects originally contrived by others; yet every succeeding generation can rise only by standing upon the shoulders of the generations that went before, and it is justified in availing itself of all that these earlier generations may have discovered and invented. Robert-Houdin tells us himself that he was greatly indebted to the Comte de Grisy, whose stage-name was Torrini. In fact, Robert-Houdin might be called a pupil of Torrini, as Mr. John S. Sargent is a pupil of Carolus Duran. It was upon Torrini's dignified simplicity as a magician that Robert-Houdin modelled his own unpretending presentation of his feats of magic. Apparently it was a famous conjurer named Frikell, who first discarded the cumbersome and glittering array of apparatus which used to be displayed on the stage to dazzle the eyes of the spectators; but this discarding of obtrusive paraphernalia was not deliberate, being due only to the accidental destruction of Frikell's stage-furniture by fire, whereby the performer was suddenly forced to rely upon the less complicated experiments, which could be exhibited without extraneous aid. The abandoning of overt apparatus, which Frikell was forced into by misfortune, Robert-Houdin adopted as an abiding principle. He kept his stage as unencumbered as possible, altho, of course, he brought forward from time to time the special objects necessary for the illusions he was about to exhibit.