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THE RING

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DIFFERENT persons would have different thoughts as they read the title of this essay. A romantic girl might visualise a diamond or a sapphire, or, if she were without superstition (but she isn’t), an opal; a musician might think of Wagner; and a devotee of the Fancy, of Carpentier or Jimmy Wilde. But when I set the words down I had only the circus in mind. The ring is, to me, the circus ring, that round space, forty-two feet in diameter, enclosed in a red-baized rim and covered with tan, which to all simple-minded creatures symbolises a section at any rate of the terrestrial paradise.

I say simple-minded; and nothing so convinces me of the wrongness of the world as the fact that the circus is under a cloud, while in London there is no circus at all. In this vast city, with its toiling, moiling millions, there is not one honest ring. You may (except at Christmas) range from Shepherd’s Bush to East Ham, from Sydenham to Hampstead Heath, and find no building bright with light and happy with laughter, where horses with backs of an astounding flatness amble, and equestriennes pirouette and leap and bewitch, and clowns affect to help with the carpet but only hinder, and acrobats dazzle by their intrepidity and address. For scores and scores of years London was never without a permanent circus, and to-day there is none. But how gladly the Londoner would welcome one is proved at Christmas, when both Olympia and the Crystal Palace become human again.

In Paris there are permanent circuses. I was at one the other day—the Medrano—which is sacred to the innocent drolleries of those three beneficent brothers, the Fratellini. Whenever I go to Paris I seek the company of the Fratellini, and enjoy it. They never fail me. The fact that they are always there and always popular (every night in the week, including Sundays, and at three matinees) while we have no clowns left, goes to prove how much simpler-minded are the French than ourselves. And yet the Parisians are supposed to be more sophisticated than we!

But, of course, in reality they are not so. We English sometimes grow up, but the French never do. If they did Paris would not support always two, and sometimes four, circuses, nor would they take the delight that they do in the fairs that are continually interrupting the traffic and rending the air with whistles and waltzes in each arrondissement in turn. I was in Paris on the night when the fête de Montmartre began, and I watched spellbound the parties of pleasure-seekers, and envied them their enthusiasm and uncomplicated joy. They were of all ages and they could not be satiated. Especially did they love the roundabouts. They were whirled on the backs of horses, on the backs of cows, but particularly on the backs of pigs; they were flung from side to side in great copper casseroles, which had a double movement, revolving eccentrically both around the steam organ and on axes of their own. What, I wondered, is the special attraction for the simple-minded that the process of revolution holds: the harmless revolution of the roundabout and the circus ring. For the complex, the theatre, the progress of dramatic events; but for the simple, the child-like, mere circulation can suffice.

The difference between the simple soul and the elaborate is largely this: that the simple soul is satisfied with the same, but the elaborate wants change. A little girl that I know, when she is offered a new book, asks to have a certain old one read to her again: either she never tires of this story, or she is fearful that the new one may be inferior to it. Similarly, the French, for all their big black beards, never tire of the fair or of the circus—the great value of the circus being its dependable antiquity, its veneration for tradition. In the circus you know what to expect, and you get it. You know, for instance, that one of the clowns will pursue his hat, eternally kicking it just out of reach. If he failed to do this your heart would be broken! In London we now prefer the cinema, and we are so sophisticated and unsimple, such gluttons for novelty, that the cinema has to be continually changing.

I do not want to set up comparisons; besides, I am increasingly a believer in the rhythm of life, and feel secure in my mind that there will be another of the periodical returns to nature, when the circus will come to its own again; but one cannot blind one’s eyes to the fact that the cinema is a far less healthy taste. The cinema is mechanism, it is witnessed under insanitary conditions, and it traffics at fourth hand in counterfeit emotions. On the stage the emotions are only at third hand, but one does at least see and hear the actual persons who pretend to them; who, as well as they can, carry out the author’s idea of how real people would have behaved. But the cinema can offer only the photographs of the performers who pretend to feel the emotions that the author fancies would have animated real people. This is remote indeed! I am not attacking the cinema; it has given me far too much pleasure for me to be so ungrateful as that; but I am also not, I hope, in danger of committing the fault of over-rating it.

The circus has more positive virtues. The circus is open and light. The entertainment is at first hand and calls on high qualities of strength and restraint and skill. Any picturesque debauchee can cut a presentable figure on the films, but a circus artiste has to keep in training. The spectacle of an athlete in the ring is salutary to the young. For centuries it has been so: the weight of the ages is behind it. I like, too, the thought that the circus which one is visiting is in every respect unique. Only those present are the witnesses of it, whereas the same cinema story is being followed at the same time by people all over the world, and even the same play can be performed by many companies simultaneously. It is true that other beautiful ladies may be leaping at this moment through tissue paper hoops in Rome, in Baltimore, in Godalming, in Adelaide, and in Stockholm, but they are different hoops, and the lady, though like, is different too. This lady is ours and ours alone. But the same photograph of Charlie Chaplin is, at this moment, evoking shouts of laughter in all those and hundreds of thousands of other cities and towns and even villages, wherever a picture palace exists. In other words, the circus offers us preferential treatment.

It is, however, the candour of the ring, its open healthiness, the honest fun of it, the high athletic standards of it, that are its greatest and most radiant merits. Whatever else London may lack, a wise administrator would see to it that there was always a circus in its midst. It would be better for us than much legislation.

Those astute fellows, the managers—but they are not really astute: I know several; they only affect to be—will open circuses again directly they feel that the time is more than ripe; but if I were a millionaire I should open one at once, just to see how many pure souls London numbers. More, very likely, than the professional popularity-assayers suppose. Why, I can think of several as I write. There is, well, there is myself, for one. And—well, I won’t trouble you with all the others just now, but there is the boy who cleans the boots at my friend’s house at Thames Ditton. A little while ago the angel visitant, Lord George, pitched his tent in that neighbourhood for a night or so, and the boy was asked if he would like to go. Would he like to go! The morning after found him still in a semi-trance of delight. He was questioned as to what he had most enjoyed. He had most enjoyed seeing something which he had heard about all his life (thirteen long years, if you please), but had feared he never might see: a lady on horseback jumping through hoops. And, of course, when you come to think of it, that is the circus crystallised—a lady jumping through hoops: young, lovely, incomparably and inimitably gifted, dressed in gauze, riding a charger with the negligence of mastery, distributing smiles and jumping through hoops. It is coloured representations of her in this feat that are chosen to advertise the circus, while pictures of elephants and clowns languish in the billposter’s cellar. It is she herself who ever since the days of Nero has lured younger sons to become circus camp followers; even so cool and cynical a youth as the late Henry Labouchere could take service in an American show for her sake!

Being a millionaire, I should be able to afford a loss, but I doubt if there would be one. And then, if my guess were correct and the pure souls rolled up in their thousands, how the astute managers would fall over each other to build rival circuses and over-do the whole thing! For that is their way. Meanwhile, having no money of my own, I am hoping that these lines may chance to attract the eye of some war profiteer who needs a little guidance as to the expenditure of his. Surely among that mighty host there must be one who remembers what a circus meant to him, in those distant days when he was still innocent, and would like such rapture as he knew then to be shared now by others, with the chances of a dividend for himself thrown in? If he will come forward and buy a site and get to business and is in need of a literary fellow to suggest a name for the new circus and generally keep his heart up, he has only to apply to me and I will do it all for love.