GRAND GUIGNOLISM
Dandin, the judge in Racine’s comedy ofLes Plaideurs, offers to amuse Isabelle by the spectacle of a little torturing. “Eh! Monsieur,” exclaims Isabelle, “eh, Monsieur, peut on voir souffrir des malheureux?” and Dandin, in his reply, speaks for a by no means negligible proportion of the human race: “Bon! cela fait toujours passer une heure ou deux.” Dandin was a Guignolite.
We all have our Guignolite moments, moments of Taine’s “ferocious gorilla” surviving in civilized man, when we seek the spectacle of torture or physical suffering or violent death; but we are careful to æsthetize them, refine them into moments of poetry or art. The pleasure of tragedy is æsthetic. Nevertheless, tragedy involves violent death, and without that would be an idle tale. So Rousseau was not altogether wrong when he said we go to a tragedy for the pleasure of seeing others suffer, without suffering ourselves. Your true Guignolite simply prefers his tragedy “neat,” without æsthetic dilution. But I think it is unfair to charge him, as he is so often charged, with a love of the horrible for its own sake. I think, rather, that he is moved, a little more actively than the rest of the world, by curiosity.
It is customary to talk of curiosity as though it were essentially ignoble. Children, women, and savages are said to have most of it. It accounts for “fortune-telling,” prophetic almanacs, spiritualisticséancesand other forms of alleged communication with the dead. But the truth is, curiosity, the desire to enlarge experience, is a highly valuable, or, rather, indispensable, human attribute. Without it there could be no science, no progress, and finally no human life at all. And you cannot restrict it. It must crave for all forms of experience. Some of us will be sweeping the heavens for new stars, and others will want to peep into Bluebeard’s cupboard. More particularly we are curious to know what is already known to others. We desire to see with our own eyes what others have seen and reported to us. That is why so many people have gone toChu Chin Chow. We wish to realize for ourselves, by the direct aid of our own senses, “What it’s like.” And the more difficult it is to see, the greater the secrecy, the intimacy, of its actual happening in life, the greater our curiosity to see a picture or other representation of it. Hence the vogue of stage bedroom scenes, newspaper portraits of “the victim” and “the place of the crime,” and Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.
I believe that is why “cela”—the horrible, the dreadful, the gruesome—“fait toujours passer une heure ou deux” for your Guignolite. It satisfies his curiosity about an experience which in real life it israre or difficult to obtain. For instance, they have been showing at the London Grand Guignol a representation of a criminal’s last half-hour before execution. Time was when you could see that for yourself, follow the prisoner in the cart to Tyburn, and offer him nosegays or pots of beer. In that time, enjoying the real thing, you wanted no mimic representation of it. For stage purposes you only cared to have it fantasticated—as inThe Beggar’s Opera. To-day you cannot (unless you are a prison official or the hangman himself) enjoy the real thing; the Press is excluded; so you seek the next best thing, a realistic stage picture of it. “Realistic,” I say. That is the merit of Mr. Reginald Berkeley’sEight o’Clock, wherein there is not a trace of staginess or imported sentiment. He gives you what you are looking for, the nearest substitute for the real thing. You are shown, as accurately as possible, “what it’s like.” You see how the warders behave, and how the chaplain and how the prisoner—with the result that you feel as though, for that terrible half-hour, you had been in Newgate yourself. You have gone through an experience which in actual life (let us hope) you will never have. Your curiosity has been satisfied.
And I think realism will have to be the mainstay of the Grand Guignol programmes. There is another “shocker” in the bill,Private Room No. 6, by a French author, M. de Lorde, which seemed to me not half so effective as the other because it waslargely tinged with romance. Here again was an attempt to gratify curiosity about an unusual experience. The incident was distinctly “private and confidential.” How many of us have had the chance of seeing a fiercely-whiskered Muscovite kissing and biting a (convenientlydécolletée) lady on the shoulder, subsequently swallowing a tumblerful of kummel at a draught, and presently being strangled by the lady’s glove? This, you may say, was realistic enough, but what made it romantic, theatrical, was the obviously artificial arrangement of the story, the “preparations,” the conventional types. You knew at once you were in the theatre and being served with carefully calculated “thrills.” That is to say, your curiosity was solely about what was going to happen next in the playwright’s scheme—the common interest of every stage plot—which is a very different thing from curiosity about strange, rare, experiences in actual life. You felt that Mr. Berkeley had really shown you “what it’s like.” You felt that M. de Lorde had only shown you what his skill in theatrical invention was like.
And there, I suspect, we reach a limitation of Grand Guignolism. The art of drama at its best—shall we call it grand art, as distinguished from Grand Guignol art?—does not exist to gratify curiosity. The best drama does not provoke the spectator’s curiosity about what is going to happen so much as excite in him a keen desire that a certain thing shall happen and then satisfy that desire to the full. TheGreek tragedians did not scruple to announce their plot in advance. Lessing, in his “Hamburg Dramaturgy,” maintains that “the dramatic interest is all the stronger and keener the longer and more certainly we have been allowed to foresee everything,” and adds, “So far am I from holding that the end ought to be hidden from the spectator that I don’t think the enterprise would be a task beyond my strength were I to undertake a play of which the end should be announced in advance, from the very first scene.” The truth is, in the fine art of drama we are seeking what we seek in every fine art—beauty, a new form and colouring to be given to the actions and emotions of the real world by the artist’s imagination. But even on the lower plane of realism Grand Guignolism has ample scope. The one-act formula has a clear technical advantage in the single scene and strict coincidence of supposed with actual time, great helps both to unity of impression. (One counted the minutes inEight o’Clockalmost as anxiously as the condemned man did.) And it has the immense fun of theatrical experiment, of seeing how far you can go, what shocks the public can stand and what it can’t, the joy of adventurously exploring the unknown and theinédit. Above all, if it is wise it will remember that (as I believe at any rate) its public does not yearn for the “shocking” incident merely as such, but as representing a rare experience, and it will look for some rarities that are not shocking.