Second nights; people and ideas of the theatre to-day

Front matter

PN

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

Preface

The first-nighter, as everybody knows, is a bored but witty person, with a black ribbon to his eye-glasses, who descends to his seat just before the curtain rises, and turns to survey the house ere he sits down. In New York, where theatres spring up overnight, he may be the large, red-necked man who supplied the concrete, but he is generally, at any rate, an insider, stirred by many things that pass the outsider by and inclined to be as concerned over the probable size of the audience on the third Tuesday as in the mere pleasure or nourishment to be had from the play. He is both spectator and participant, urging a new ship down the ways, and finds his interest divided perforce between the ship as a ship and the success of the launching. Author and players are waiting behind that closed curtain — be the play never so unimportant, there is mystery and excitement in the air.

Preface

The second-nighter breathes a duller ether. Gone is the mystery and contagious warmth, the first night's febrile unrest. The showman has opened his bag of tricks; the pack are off, baying after new game. There is "no one" in the audience. The man in front does not turn round to tell you how the author sat up all the night before rewriting his third act — he is mere "paper," or the brother of the property man's wife, or the sad-eyed subeditor of a technical magazine, or an out-oftown "buyer" drifted in to "The Lady from the Sea," thinking it a musical comedy. The play is better given than on the first night, but it stands on its own feet, is shorn of extraneous glamour. And the second-nighter himself, though he turn up as regular as the clock — and magazine critics are likely to receive tickets for second nights — is scarcely detached from the common herd. He is part of the "public." The news and the spot-light have swung on ere he arrives.

Nor is this without its compensations. If

he misses the gossip and excitement, he has

a clearer view of the play. If a critic, he is

almost too remote and leisurely to be worth

[ vi]

Preface

the showman's time and is left a free agent, to come and go unnoticed in the crowd.

The observations recorded here were made through several years of second nights — a period from 1905 down to the present, of interesting and significant change in the Enghshspeaking theatre — in the intervals of other reporting. The "second" night sometimes became the second week or month, and a flood or a prize-fight, a revolution or a political convention, came in between. This, in itself, inclined one toward the general and human rather than severely technical aspect of the stage, and perhaps explains the fact that burlesquers and sombre poets, vaudevillians and fine-spun realists, are lumped together somewhat unceremoniously. The inclination was increased in my own case by the fact that in writing for "Collier's"— where some of these comments originally appeared — one was serving not only the man in the flat overhead and the mythical old lady in Oshkosh for whom all American magazines are edited, but— so we fondly imagined— pioneers in prairie boomtowns and soldiers in tropical isles. The theatre and its people are a side of life, like [ vii]

Prejace

any other, and these chapters present certain impressions and opinions of it which, for one reason or another, shine out of that long and brightly lighted vista of theatre nights, that blur of audiences and of players, with a certain warmth and friendliness, like remembered faces seen in a crowd.

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Contents

I

IS

IV.

II

Our old friend, the theatrical band-wagon, not without some creaks in his joints, with bits of his new gingerbread cracking and tumbling down on the cobblestones, is coming down the street again. How the people, all fresh from their summers in the country, crowd round, glad to see the lights and hear the old tunes played again! Let's down into the street with them and see what we can see. In front, right up with the driver, we discern the lean, restless countenance of Mr. G. Bernard Shaw. What a busy and amusing person it is! With one hand he explodes firecrackers and sends up skyrockets, trailing long tails of brightest sparks — Whis-s-sh! — into the air. They burst up there, and little balloons go trailing away with strange mottoes on them. From the ground they are a bit hard to read, but some of them look like "2+2 = 5," "Hate Your Neighbors," "Dishonor Your Parents," "Whatever You Are Be Queer," and the like. Few of the crowd try to make them out, but they laugh at the bright colors and clap their hands. In his other hand Mr. Shaw holds a big slap-stick. With this he reaches out and whacks the people in the crowd — ^wherever a head shows — because he is clever with his slap-stick and wants you to know it. Sometimes he catches shifty folks before they can dodge

[IS]

— see old Pecksniff's top-hat go tumbling into the gutter and hear the crowd roar — but quite as often he comes down— Slap ! — on the young, unsuspecting ones, so pleased with their dreams and enthusiasms, and what they call their ideals, that they never think to get out of the way. Watch him catch that young girl, crowding up the rest, laughing and breathless, on the arm of her young man.

"He thinks you're a divinity now," shouts Mr. Shaw, "but if he marries you, in a month you won't have any more divinity for him than a muffin!"

"Then you mean to say he'll get tired of me?" gasps the young girl, tears springing into her eyes.

"No, not at all!" returns Mr. Shaw, with a burst of his queer, sardonic laughter, "one doesn't get tired of muffins!"

Of course, a slap-stick does not hurt much, but isn't it odd for a grown-up man to like so much to whack those whom he can whack so easily? Some of the crowd seem to think so, anyway, and they are pushing up, shouting: "Throw him out of the band-wagon!" But the fellows sitting up on the high stools wave their arms frantically and tell everybody to hush up and keep still. These, it seems, are the critics — the men on the high stools.

"Ssh!" they cry. "Never mind what Shaw does! Don't take him seriously, because that's just what he likes; besides, it will make people think you come from Galesburg or Kansas City!"

But the band-wagon passes on and our frightened maiden dries her eyes, "Oh, look!" she cries, for down the street another top-hat has gone bumpety-bump into the gutter. "After all, he's a very funny man and almost the only one in the band-wagon with any life."

"I'd like to get hold of him," says the young man. "I'd show him!" But the girl only laughs — now quite merrily.

"Oh, never mind," says she, "it didn't hurt, really." She is a faith curist, you see, and if you only have faith, folks like Mr. Shaw can whack you over the head as hard as ever they want to, and it doesn't hurt.

These words, written in the dark backward and abysm of 1905, when Ibsen was still regarded as a rather horrible old gentleman growing toadstools in a cellar and the younger English realists had not been heard of, express a feeling rather common to American audiences when first they saw Mr. Shaw's plays — perhaps one should say when first his plays saw them.

I well recall that busy New York noon, the Childs Restaurant on Sixth Avenue just above Fourteenth Street. Undimmed return the two fat ladies opposite, in slightly wilted white shirt-waists, munching butter cakes;

[ 17 1 the afternoon paper propped against the sugar bowl; the steady clatter of dishes; the gnawing distress of mind. "Man and Superman" had just appeared, and it devolved on a dramatic reporter to say something about it.

Now, it is not difficult to say something about the ordinary play. The spectator feels that if he took a day off he could write a better one, or at least that he knows where the author made his mistakes. He watches the pla5rwright as he watches a man walk a tight rope. He couldn't do it himself, perhaps, but he knows how it ought to be done.

This restful pose, however, was precisely what Mr. Shaw would not permit. What the audience thought of him appeared the least of his troubles, so absorbed was he in making clear how little he thought of them. He followed the rule of street fighting and knocked the other man down first. He tangled us up in dialectic nets and shot our pet ideas full of holes, and we were as ready to reply as to argue with a repeating rifle.

Such was the painful situation that day in the restaurant, when suddenly, through the humid air, fragrant of coffee and toast and browning griddle-cakes, Mr. Shaw and his band-wagon appeared, and the pleasures of reporting replaced the more laborious task of making up one's mind.

Nearly everybody in those days was made uneasy by Mr. Shaw — theirs the same defensive attitude, a similar plaintive note. They were used to "letting themselves go" in the theatre, and they found that with him they never could let themselves go. They must always be ready to dodge. They were used to catching the author's meaning — not a violent chase, generally — but they couldn't catch Mr. Shaw. He was an electric eel, with a very high intellectual voltage, watching for a chance to sting his pursuers, leave them gasping and vaguely hurt.

Glancing recently, for the first time in several years, into one of Mr. Shaw's plays, I was surprised to find how harmless and well-meaning he had become. His brilliance had not tarnished in the interval— compared with this fancy skater, most of the other wits of the day seem to be shuffling about in their goloshes — but it was less clear that he was solely bent on our embarrassment and undoing. I was curious enough to read through the other plays and prefaces — in several cases the first time I had taken the trouble to find out what he actually said instead of taking him for granted — and the impression was but deepened. It even appeared doubtful if, in spite of his fondness for beating the big drum, he ever made an assertion— even that he was better than Shakespeare — that, in the sense he intended it, he could not back up.

The discovery is not, I fear, a dazzling one, but one is tempted to enlarge on it a little here if but to continue an inspection interrupted that day in the restaurant and make a trifle clearer the shrieks of anguish that used to fill the air.

Looking back at Mr. Shaw in the light of some of our own journalistic phenomena, one might almost call him the first of the " muckrakers." Before the magazine critics began to attack specific local abuses, he was a kind of muck-raker at large, out against the pillars of society. The world has changed a good deal since Mr. Shaw's plays first appeared — we are all, so to speak, iconoclasts now, and any sweet girl graduate can lisp things about rich [ 20]

men, reactionary politicians, and the uneven distribution of justice which would have been regarded as anarchistic in 1892. Mr. Shaw was a pioneer, for one thing — incredibly keen, clear-headed, suspicious of humbug, as much an alien in England as any witty Frenchman, and ready to hit any head in sight.

He had a curious clear-sightedness, unclouded by most of the mists of sentiment and sense which envelop the ordinary person, and a fierce objection to being so enveloped. He must always know just where he was at. Imagine him, to take an obvious example, in the front row at a Broadway musical comedy alongside one of our famous, tired business men. The Sixteen Beautiful Milhners, shipwrecked on a desert isle, are about to be marched off to the harem of the local Bluebeard, when the timely arrival of a United States war-ship transfers them to the gallant arms of chorus-gentlemen marines.

The audience, who wish they were marines, are permitted vicariously to become such whilst a tropical moon hitches up the back drop. In its melting light the exiled Americans sing "Home, Sweet Home," then the band swings into a ragtime medley of patriotic airs, and the curtain goes down with the hmelight sizzHng on a waving American flag and the well-powdered arms of the Sixteen Milliners, with a few of the audience rising awkwardly as "The Star-Spangled Banner" is played.

The weary Titan of finance, fatigued as one is who has ridden to and from an office in a well-padded limousine, smoked a dozen fiftycent cigars, eaten a heavy luncheon, a still heavier dinner, and taken no exercise, decides that life is beginning to look up and applauds energetically for another sight of the flag and the lovely milliners. Mr. Shaw, on the other hand, is beside himself. It is not, as he would explain, that he objects to vulgarity. Falstaff or Doll Tearsheet do not bother him in the least. What infuriates him is this mixing of show girls and patriotism. It represents a muddled thinking which offends his taste. His logical mind demands everjrthing in its place, while in most of the audience's minds things are all over the place. He wants to get rid of the flag or rid of the girls. And to hear him go at it, you might think to get rid of the girls he would get rid of patriotism itself.

Mr. Shaw, as he reveals amusingly in his prefaces, had aggravated his natural austerity by nearly asphyxiating himself in art and the talk of it. Any one who has been put through a course of studio teas will know what this means. Mr. Shaw had kept at it for years, writing musical, literary, and dramatic criticism, stuffing his senses until, as he expressed it, he sank like a baby fed on starch. Like a man who had been restricted to an exclusive diet of cream puffs, he was completely and irrevocably against cream puffs, i. e., against anything soft, pretty, romantic — all the pleasant mists of make-believe with which people hide themselves from reality. He wanted to bite tenpenny nails or, like his own Mr. Crampton in "You Never Can Tell," crack nuts with his teeth to strengthen his character.

If somebody had shanghaied Mr. Shaw and compelled him to serve before the mast for a couple of years, live on hardtack and salt-horse, and furl sails barehanded in zero weather, he might have got over some of his fierceness against pretty things. Nobody did so, and in his own reaction from creampuffery he seemed to see thousands of people pleasantly drugging themselves on sentimental concerts, sermons, and fiction in order to forget overcrowded tenements, poverty, disease, crime, and the things that should have worried them.

"Paper apostles and artist magicians," he snorted, anathematizing the whole race of artists, "who have succeeded in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination. . . . The pleasures of the senses I can sympathize with and share, but the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for intellectuality and honesty is the very devil."

There was another side to this strange clearheadedness of Mr. Shaw's — his ability to work out everything in our complex world in a perfectly "natural," rational way, as if he had just stepped off an aeroplane from Mars, an intensely keen, witty person who knew nothing of our curious inherited prejudices and conventions.

Now, of course, the world we actually live in is not in the least "natural" or "rational."

There is nothing rational nor beautiful about the woollen pipes in which the modern man encases his legs nor in a "bowler" hat; yet when Mr. Raymond Duncan ventured to appear bareheaded in New York, in a rather beautiful and thoroughly rational Greek costume, the Broadway policeman, symbol of thoroughly irrational authority, promptly — and with the loud approval of press and public — clapped him into jail. If looks were spears the man who tried to walk up Fifth Avenue in a comfortable pair of white "sneakers" would die a thousand deaths ere he had strolled a dozen blocks.

There is generally a reason for these apparent unreasons, but it is not always to be found on the surface, and a clever man, merely by looking at things in this perfectly "natural" way, arrives at astonishing conclusions — paradoxes, as they are called — ^which hurt and bewilder yet cannot, at the moment, be answered.

"Twelve lawful children," says Mr. Shaw in his rational way, "borne by one highly respectable lady to three different fathers is not impossible nor condemned by public opinion. That such a lady may be more law-abiding than the poor girl whom we used to spurn into the gutter for bearing one unlawful infant is no doubt true ; but dare you say she is less self-indulgent?"

"She is less virtuous," you reply stoutly; "that is enough for me."

"In that case," Mr. Shaw demands, "what is virtue but the trade-unionism of the married?"

Answers to such knocks may doubtless be found next morning, but in the theatre they follow one another too rapidly, and when morning comes it is easier to hurry off to one's office, assuming that the playwright was an impudent crank, than it is to read all that he wrote, and the preface before the play, and to learn, perhaps, that he was overstating a truth in order to get people to look at it, just as a politician who wants a loaf sometimes gets a slice by calling his opponents murderers and bandits, when, if he were charitable, he might never be heard at all.

The "rational," man-from-Mars argument is not always a fair one, yet it is often used with good effect by reformers, trying, as Mr. [26]

Shaw was trying, to attract attention and wake people up to the fact that some of their popular notions make them do foolish and wicked things. Duelling, for instance, used to be such a general and fashionable idea, and it was made unpopular by exactly Mr. Shaw's kind of argument — by stripping it of romance and making people feel that there was nothing fine in two men squaring off and trying to murder one another.

People who believe that war is wicked and absurd often use the "natural" argument against it, and a thinker like Tolstoi will talk as if he were seeing soldiers for the first time and knew nothing of the ideas they stood for; as if one national flag was but a piece of bunting like another ; and make it appear ridiculous that a hundred thousand men with blue eyes, who love life and their families, should try to murder a hundred thousand other men with black eyes, who also love life and their families, merely because they disagree about an imaginary line.

It is an effective kind of argument because it gets people off their high horses and down to earth, and it is also an unsound kind of argument in so far as the high horses are necessary and worth while. Of course, people can no more get along without romance than they can get along without bread and shoes, and yet there is so much fake romance that undoubtedly it is a good thing for an idol smasher like Mr. Shaw to come along now and then and clear the air. And the London theatres of the early nineties were likely places to start on.

There was much less chance then of finding plays that seemed to discuss, interpret, or make interesting the vital things in people's every-day lives. The younger English realists had yet to appear, while the same critics who would blandly swallow the furtive vulgarity of musical comedy foamed at the mouth at the recently translated Ibsen plays, as if the grim old Norwegian had stolen their silver or run off with their wives.

Their ravings seem almost incredible now, and it is scarcely to be wondered at if Mr. Shaw felt that "the actor's main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator when he is through with what he calls the serious business of the day. To them [28 ]

such phrases as impassioned poetry or passionate love of truth have fallen out of their vocabulary. To them passion, the life of the drama, means nothing but primitive excitement."

Pinero was on the tip of the wave and a far more accomplished playwright than Mr. Shaw was ever to become, yet he was a man of the theatre rather than a thinker, and to this high-voltage radical must have seemed almost as abreast of the times as a leading gentleman in musical comedy seems to the leader of a settlement house. More creampuffery, or so it doubtless seemed to Mr. Shaw, and he set out to write a new kind of play — plays that should bring into the theatre things in the air intelligent people were breathing, that spoke their language and would make them sit up and take notice of things he thought it high time they were noticing.

These were many, chief among them the falsity and foolishness of "romance" — of masking in pleasant general ideas, that is to say, life's actual facts. Ibsen had already set the fashion of attacking ideals to which the individual enslaved himself and Mr. Shaw took up the same game in his lighter and more pyrotechnic way. Here, in "Arms and the Man," one of his earlier plays, we find him charging at militarism and the military ideal. His method was somewhat that of Cervantes when the latter showed how absurd the romantic conventions of chivalry became when persisted in in a world which had outgrown them, except that in the Shaw farce it was the soldier who was completely matter-of-fact and rational and the Bulgarians, amongst whom he found himself, whose romantic notions of war were laughed at.

Bluntschli fought for his pay envelope like any office hack, and as for not fearing death, he cheerfully admitted that all good soldiers feared it very much, because it was a soldier's duty to live as long as he could and kill as many of the enemy as possible. When the young Bulgarian lady started to idealize the man who led a cavalry charge as "the bravest of the brave," Bluntschli only grinned and explained that, as a matter of fact, the man's horse was running away with him. When the lady's parents, trying in their mediaeval [30]

way to impress Bluntschli with the style of Uving she had been accustomed to, mention their twenty-four horses, the Swiss replies that he himself has seventy.

"I have nine thousand six hundred pairs of sheets and blankets, with two thousand four hundred eiderdown quilts. I have ten thousand knives and forks and the same quantity of dessert-spoons. I have six hundred servants, I have six palatial establishments, besides two livery-stables, a tea-garden, and a private house ..."

"Are you Emperor of Switzerland?" asks the pompous Petkoff. Bluntschli explained that he kept a hotel.

In "The Devil's Disciple," when General Burgoyne is asked to spare the life of one of his prisoners, he replies: "Martyrdom is what these people like. It is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability." When his prisoner, following the custom of spirited captives in fiction, demands that he be shot like a man instead of hung like a dog, Burgoyne answers sympathetically: "Now, there, Mr. Anderson, you talk like a civilian, if you will excuse my saying so. Have you any idea of the marksmanship of the army of his Majesty, King George the Third? If we make up a firing party, what will happen? Half of them will miss you ; the rest will make a mess of the business and leave you to the provo-marshal's pistol. Whereas we can hang you in a perfectly workmanlike and agreeable way. Let me persuade you to be hanged, Mr. Anderson."

Mr. Shaw has a wonderful gift for this sort of thing — for taking posers unawares joggling people out of their attitudes, pouncing on the strongest thing that can be said on the "wrong" side of a question and promptly saying it with such wit and force that it seems for the moment unanswerable.

He is never more amusing than in his attacks on art and artists, for here we are getting an insider's point of view — the sarcasm of a man, himself an artist, yet sane and vigorous enough to see the weaknesses of his own kind and to jump on them unmercifully.

What could be quainter and more unexpected — at least to a generation which has forgotten Gilbert — than such a scene as that in "Antony and Cleopatra," where ApoUodorus,

"a dashing young man of about twenty-four, dressed with deUberate estheticism in the most delicate purples and dove grays," is stopped on his way to Cleopatra with some beautiful carpets by the matter-of-fact Roman Sentinel :

Sentinel {not at all impressed, pointing to the carpets): And what is all this truck?

Apollodorus: Carpets for the furnishing of the Queen's apartments. I have picked them from the best carpets in the world; and the Queen shall choose the best of my choosing.

Sentinel: So you are a carpet merchant?

Apollodorus {hurt) : My friend, I am a Patrician.

Sentinel: A Patrician! A Patrician keeping a shop instead of following arms!

Apollodorus : I do not keep a shop. Mine is a temple of the arts. I am a worshipper of beauty. My calling is to choose beautiful things for beautiful Queens. My motto is Art for Art's Sake.

Sentinel: That is not the password.

Apollodorus: It is a universal password.

Sentinel: I know nothing about universal passwords. Either give me the password for the day or get back to your shop.

Part of the fun of this comes, of course, from the surprise of finding an ancient Roman talking like a sub-art-editor at a studio tea, or the sort of young man who loves to help middle-aged society ladies, whose husbands are busy down-town, arrange the details of Colonial balls or pageants at the Plaza. But the real surprise is to meet this kind of satire in the theatre at all. Just as Kipling once surprised the ordinary man by showing that literature belonged to him, with his ships, machinery, and day's work, and wasn't monopolized by long-haired gentlemen in velvet coats, so Mr. Shaw similarly surprised and delighted by showing how easy it was to play quite comfortably in the theatre with ideas generally thought to be the property of literary critics or philosophers. He made a sort of intellectual farce almost fashionable — or, at any rate, he would have done so if more play-writers were well-read and witty enough to follow his lead.

In all his hooting at the aesthetic pose, he amusingly takes sides with the every-day man. "I know there are men," says he, "who, having nothing to say and nothing to write, are nevertheless so in love with oratory and literature, that they keep desperately repeating as much as they can understand of what others have said or written aforetime. I know that the leisurely tricks which their want of conviction leaves them free to play with the diluted and misapprehended message, supply them with a pleasant parlor game which they call style."

The artistic pose is not as fashionable as it was when Mr. Shaw first came to London — although here in America the absorption of most of the first-rate men in business often encourages the sixth-rate man who writes or paints or plays the piano to bask in a glamour he could not hold for a week were competition as keen in his as in other fields — but there is still enough to go round.

And just as it amuses and relieves us from our cramped attitudes of adoration to be told that the cavalry hero's horse was running away, so we are similarly relieved after our long praise of the artist's sacrifice of everything for his art, to hear Mr. Shaw — himself one of them— fling back: "Yes— the true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, rather than work at anything but his art. To women he is half-vivisector, half-vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing they have the power to make him see visions and dream dreams, inspire him as he calls it. He steals the mother's milk and blackens it to make printer's ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal woman with. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them will enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a deeper philosophy."

This may be overaccenting the "wrong" side of the matter, yet once we have learned the trick of it — learned, that is to say, that the "villain" of the Shavian drama is not the ordinary cutthroat but the "wrong side," so to speak, of the conventional hero — there is a tonic flavor in the bitterness and we feel that same stimulating sense of "standing up to the facts" we get so often with Mr. Shaw.