Part 12

The _mot de caractère_, the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth without letting fall the word _humor_. “That’s the humor of it” is not at all humorous to-day.

But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said yet once more, may be made to serve as a _mot de caractère_, as a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’ when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth again and again in that particular predicament.

In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.

When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”

The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the ‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a bank!”

It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples illustrate the _mot de caractère_ or the _mot de situation_, since they illuminate both character and situation. But the _mot de situation_ can exist independently, relying for its effect solely upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous. A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.” This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the spectators.

V

Much ingenuity has been expended in trying to draw a hard and fast line between qualities which are closely akin, between talent and genius, for example. We are told that “talent does what it can and genius does what it must”; and this sounds impressive, no doubt, but it does not get us any forwarder. It implies a distinction in kind which is difficult to prove. So it is with the corresponding attempts to distinguish sharply between wit and humor. We can see clearly enough that many of Sheridan’s clever things are wit, beyond all question; and we can also see that most of Molière’s clever things are humor; but there remain not a few laughter-provoking effects which it is almost impossible to classify. Perhaps some of them cannot fairly be entitled either witty or humorous; they are just funny.

In one of Charles Hoyt’s unpretending farcical comedies, all of them unhesitatingly American, new births of our new soil, there was a droll creature who found it amusing to purloin a succession of articles from a certain house, crossing the stage again and again at intervals bearing out the objects he was appropriating, the last of these being nothing less than a red-hot stove. On one of his earlier marauding expeditions he came before the audience with a huge ostrich egg in one hand and with a tiny bantam chicken in the other. He came down to the footlights and stood for a moment looking first at the egg and then at the hen, with growing amazement. Finally he said, “Well, I don’t believe it!”

Now, I cannot call the remark witty in itself, and I am not at all sure that it is humorous; but it is funny,—at least this was the unanimous opinion of the joyful audience. Equally funny was a brief scene in another of the nondescript spectacles of Weber and Fields. There was on one side of the stage, not too near the footlights, the portico of a house, over which was a ground glass globe with an electric bulb inside it. Weber and Fields came on together; and Weber remarked, as they faced the audience: “This is his house. I know it because he told me it had a white light over the door.” (For the benefit of my readers I shall spare them the dialect which intensified the flavor of the ensuing dialog.)

“A white light?” said Fields. “I didn’t see a white light.” At that moment the globe became red just as Fields turned to look at it. “That isn’t a white light,” he asserted when he again faced the audience. “It’s a red light!”

“I tell you it’s a white light. I saw it,” said Weber; and when he twisted his head to steal a glimpse of the globe it had again changed its color. “I bet you five dollars it is a white light!”

“Five dollars?” cried Fields looking over his shoulder at the light, which had then become red. “I bet you ten dollars it is a red light!”

“Ten dollars?” shouted Weber, “I—I—” Then he cautiously stole a look at the globe, which was once more innocent of any color. “I bet you fifty dollars it is a white light!”

When Fields, in his turn, looked back the globe was red, and he instantly raised his bet to a hundred dollars.

I forget how high the wager mounted at last, each of the pair feeling assured that he was betting on a certainty; but at last they had wagered all they possessed and with the stakes in their hands, they slowly revolved to gaze at the light together. But to their astonished dismay, and to the vociferous delight of the spectators, the light over the door was green!

“What can we do?” asked the saddened Weber. “We have both of us lost!”

And the saddened Fields answered, “We must throw the money away!”

What helps to make this pleasant scene even more pleasing is that the audience was never supplied with any explanation as to the cause of the changes of the color of the lights. That remains to this day a dark mystery.

VI

This may not be witty, and it may even not be humorous, but it was funny. It provoked incessant laughter in its progress to its apex, which was greeted with uncontrollable roars. And laughter, like that, clean and simple and honest, is a thing to be thankful for. It is what Artemus Ward called “a sweet, sweet boon.” It needs no apology and no explanation; it is its own excuse for being,—even if it resists classification. It is wholesome and hygienic; and as Henry Ward Beecher declared, “Whoever and wherever and however situated a man is, he must watch three things,—sleeping, digestion and laughing. They are three indispensable necessities.”

(1919)

XII

THE “OLD COMEDIES”

XII

THE “OLD COMEDIES”

I

It was in 1861 that Wallack’s Theater moved uptown from Broadway and Broome Street to Broadway and 13th Street and that the management passed from the hand of James W. Wallack to that of his son, Lester Wallack. In 1882 Wallack’s Theater made another migration, from Broadway and 13th Street to Broadway and 30th Street; and in this third and final home the company failed to find itself as attractive as it had been when it was lower downtown. Lester Wallack had to relinquish its control; and he was glad to accept as a provision for his declining years the proceeds of an all-star performance of ‘Hamlet’ given for his benefit with Edwin Booth as Hamlet and with Joseph Jefferson as the First Gravedigger.

It was in 1879 while the company was still in its second home, at Broadway and 13th Street, that Lester Wallack made a remark to me which helped to explain why his enterprize came to grief not long after it was transplanted to Broadway and 30th Street. He declared rather plaintively that the management of a theater in New York was in 1879 far more difficult than it had been in his father’s time. “We used to bring out the latest London success,” he told me, “and to revive the Old Comedies, and with a play now and then from Dion [Boucicault] or from John [Brougham], we got through the season very well. But I don’t really know now what people want.”

It was because he did not know what the people of New York wanted that he had to give up the management of his theater and to accept a benefit performance arranged for him by his friendly rivals, Augustin Daly and A. M. Palmer. Altho he had been born in New York Lester Wallack was always proud to consider himself an Englishman. So it was that he remained an alien in the city of his birth, unresponsive to the shifting currents of American life and unaware that the playgoers of New York were slowly surrendering their former habit of colonial dependence upon London. Wallack was so insistently English that he never found himself at home in an American part in an American play; and perhaps he may have felt that he was not really qualified to pass on the merits of a drama dealing with the life of this country. Brougham and Boucicault, Irishmen both, had each of them a far better understanding of American likes and dislikes than Wallack had, altho such an understanding is, of course, absolutely necessary to the manager of a New York theater.

His more energetic rivals in management, Daly and Palmer, often outbid him for the acquisition of the “latest London success,” and they also made direct arrangements to acquire the latest Paris success, whereas Wallack waited until this French piece had been transmogrified into a British piece, almost as foreign to the traditions of the American people as the French original had been. In time Dion and John ceased to supply him with occasional new plays. So it was that he was reduced to the third of his three sources of supply, the Old Comedies. In so doing he was for a while secure from rivalry, altho Daly was soon to become a vigorous and dangerous competitor in this field, which Wallack had long thought to be his exclusive property.

What were these Old Comedies that Wallack mentioned airily and with assurance that his hearer would know exactly what he meant? I can see how the youthful playgoer of to-day might be completely puzzled if called upon to explain this term, perfectly familiar to playgoers who were youthful two score years ago. I can hear this youthful playgoer of to-day asking for a catalog of these Old Comedies and for a list of their authors. And I can imagine him wondering also why it is that he has rarely had a chance to see these Old Comedies which delighted the lovers of the acted drama in the days of his grandfather.

II

The Old Comedies, so called, were a selected group of successful plays which had been produced in the eighteenth century, most of them (altho a few first saw the light of the lamps in the first half of the nineteenth century) and which had survived on the stage, being acted at irregular intervals at the Haymarket Theater in London, at Wallack’s and later at Daly’s Theater in New York, and at the Boston Museum. Curiously enough, no one of Shakspere’s humorous pieces, lovely comedies and lively farces, was included in the catalog of the Old Comedies, altho they were a century older than the youngest of these Old Comedies; and no one of the comic plays of Shakspere’s contemporaries, no comedy-of-humors by Ben Jonson, no dramatic-romance by Beaumont and Fletcher, was regularly enrolled in this special repertory. And, what is even more curious, no one of the comedies of the Restoration, no brilliant and brutal satire by Congreve or Wycherly, no ingenious intrigue by Vanbrugh or Farquhar, had been able to keep the stage and to demand inclusion in this rigorous selection from out the comic masterpieces of the English drama. It may be noted, in a parenthesis, that Daly did revive two of Farquhar’s amusing plays, the ‘Recruiting Officer’ and the ‘Inconstant’; but these revivals were due to Daly’s own taste and neither of these bold and brisk pieces could claim admission to the recognized group of Old Comedies.

Now, if this group did not include any of the humorous pieces of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration dramatists, what plays did it contain? And no two students of stage-history would agree on the answer to this question. No council was ever empowered to regulate the canon and to prepare a final list of the comic dramas demanding inclusion. The repertory of the Haymarket was not exactly the same as that of Wallack’s, which in its turn did not coincide absolutely with that of the Boston Museum. Yet it is safe to say that every student of stage-history would be likely to put on his list most of the plays which I now venture to include in mine. I find fifteen pieces produced in the eighteenth century which I feel compelled to catalog as truly Old Comedies:

Cibber’s ‘She Would and She Would Not’ (1703). Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Busybody’ (1709). Mrs. Centlivre’s ‘Wonder’ (1717). Garrick’s ‘High Life Below Stairs’ (1759). Colman’s ‘Jealous Wife’ (1761). Foote’s ‘Liar’ (1762). Garrick and Colman’s ‘Clandestine Marriage’ (1766). Goldsmith’s ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ (1773). Sheridan’s ‘Rivals’ (1775). Sheridan’s ‘School for Scandal’ (1777). Sheridan’s ‘Critic’ (1779). Mrs. Cowley’s ‘Belle’s Stratagem’ (1780). Holcroft’s ‘Road to Ruin’ (1792). O’Keefe’s ‘Wild Oats’ (1794). Colman the Younger’s ‘Heir at Law’ (1797).

This list calls for two immediate comments. First, only two of these plays have been acted in any New York theater in the past score of years, that is to say, in the twentieth century; and therefore playgoers under forty have not had the opportunity of seeing any of the others performed by a professional company. Second, every one of these plays was acted in New York during the final forty years of the nineteenth century, some of them being produced at different times by different companies in different theaters. For example, I have had the pleasure in the course of a half-century of playgoing of attending performances of the ‘School for Scandal’ at Wallack’s, at Niblo’s, at the Union Square and at three different Daly’s theaters.

Perhaps a third comment is warranted, to the effect that my catalog of Old Comedies includes specimens of almost every subdivision of the comic drama. The ‘School for Scandal’ is the foremost example in English of what has been called high-comedy, the humorous play in which character is more important than story and of which the plot is caused by the clash of character on character. ‘She Would and She Would Not’ is a vivacious comedy-of-intrigue; and so is the ‘Belle’s Stratagem.’ The ‘Jealous Wife’ in some of its situations, and the ‘Road to Ruin’ also, are almost too serious to be classed as comic dramas. The ‘Critic’ and ‘High Life Below Stairs’ are frankly farces, bustling with business and charged with high spirits. Even the ‘Rivals’ and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ reveal themselves as closely akin to farce, in so far as their respective actions are not caused spontaneously by the volition of the characters but are arbitrarily brought about by the author himself, visibly pulling the wires which control the movements of his puppets. Probably it was the excessive laudation bestowed on these two more or less farcical pieces of Sheridan and Goldsmith which led Sir Arthur Pinero to formulate his satiric definition: “A comedy is a farce by a deceased author.”

Possibly a fourth comment may be appended altho it must be apologized for as a doubtful digression. In my list the ‘Liar’ is credited to Samuel Foote, because it could not very well be credited to any other author. But when it was last acted in New York, the text used was a revision by Lester Wallack of an earlier condensation by Charles James Mathews. Moreover Foote’s own play was an adaptation of Corneille’s ‘Menteur,’—an adaptation more or less influenced by an earlier version of the French piece, Steele’s ‘Lying Lover.’ To go still further back, Corneille had taken his story from a Spanish original, the ‘Verdad Sospiciosa’ of Alarcon. And we may bring to an end this summary record of the strange adventures of a plot by setting down the fact that Alarcon, altho a Spaniard, had been born in Mexico. So we can, if we so choose, claim the ‘Liar’ in all its many transformations as the earliest play to be written by a native American.

To these fifteen comedies originally produced in the eighteenth century, we may add seven plays produced in the first three score years of the nineteenth century:

Tobin’s ‘Honeymoon’ (1805). Knowles’ ‘Hunchback’ (1832). Knowles’ ‘Love Chase’ (1837). Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘Money’ (1840). Boucicault’s ‘London Assurance’ (1841). Boucicault’s ‘Old Heads and Young Hearts’ (1844). Reade and Taylor’s ‘Masks and Faces’ (often called ‘Peg Woffington’) (1852).

To the best of my recollection no one of these nineteenth century pieces has been seen on the New York stage since the twentieth century began.

I have no right to assume that any other theater-goer of fifty years of experience would select exactly these twenty-two plays as being the Old Comedies; but I make bold to believe that my selection includes all the pieces which demand to be so grouped together.

III

A lover of the theater whose playgoing has been done in the past score of years may be moved to ask why it is that these plays, which evoked the loyal laughter of his father and his grandfather, have been utterly banished from the twentieth century stage, and why they are as unknown in the playhouses of London as they are in those of New York and of Boston. To this question it is possible to give three answers.

In the first place these Old Comedies show the signs of age, even when we read them. They seem to most moderns more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog, and more or less archaic in method. To assert this is to admit that they are hopelessly out of date both in their content and in their form. They abound, for example, in asides and in soliloquies, addressed directly to the audience; and they are decorated with frequent bravura passages, devised to exhibit the virtuosity of the performer, just as the solos of the earlier Italian operas were introduced merely to allow the soprano to execute her variations or the tenor to attain his high C. The tone of these humorous plays is too highly colored for our subdued taste, and many of their characters strike us as caricatures of humanity, almost fantastic in their wilful eccentricity. In short, these pieces one and all belong to a type of drama hopelessly out of fashion, unfamiliar in many of its aspects. In the theater what is unfamiliar is frequently ludicrous, merely because of its unfamiliarity; and we are inclined to laugh at it, as we do at the wearing apparel of a decade ago. In playmaking, as in dressmaking, styles change with disconcerting swiftness.

This brings us to the second reason for the disappearance of these Old Comedies from the twentieth century theater. Their departure was coincident with the breaking up of the stock-company, kept together year after year with only occasional changes in its membership. Forty years ago the company at Wallack’s, like that at the Boston Museum, was a homogeneous body, with customs of its own, imparted to the newcomers it enrolled and accepted reverently by these recruits. It was in the habit of appearing in one or more of the Old Comedies every winter; its elder members knew the traditional business and the traditional effects in each of these comic dramas; and they were glad to pass on this knowledge to the younger members. As a result of this an Old Comedy could always be used as a stop-gap when a new play had failed to please the public; and it could be brought out at a week’s notice. In other words, the stock-company was a repertory company, ready to revive on demand any one of a dozen or more Old Comedies and assured in advance that this revival would be welcome to a majority of the playgoers, many of whom would be glad of the chance to compare it with the performances of two or three seasons before.

Altho these companies at Wallack’s in New York and later at Daly’s also, as well as that at the Museum in Boston, utilized the Old Comedies mainly as life-preservers, to be put on whenever new plays sank under them, they relied upon these new plays for the major part of their season, reserving their revivals for sudden contingencies. But these new plays of half-a-century ago were not widely unlike the Old Comedies in their external characteristics; they also had their soliloquies, their asides, and their bravura passages; they were also more or less arbitrary in plot, more or less artificial in dialog and more or less archaic in method, or at least they would so appear to us of the twentieth century if they could be galvanized into life again for our inspection.