Читать книгу Judgments in Vacation - Edward Abbott Sir Parry - Страница 4

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Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice,

The stage but echoes back the public voice;

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.

—Samuel Johnson.

I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled ‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury Square.

But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely unappreciated and misunderstood.

Speaking of the actor and his profession, I pointed out that the only real test of merit in an actor was the judgment of the Box Office, and that therefore an actor is bound to play to a Box Office and succeed with a Box Office if he wants to continue to be an actor.

The suggestion was received with contempt and derision. No artist, I was told, no man of any character would deign to think of so low a thing as the Box Office. All the great men of the world were men who had had a contempt for the Box Office, and the Box Office is, and must in its nature be, a lowering and degrading influence. This opinion seemed so widely held that I decided to hold an inquest upon my original suggestion, and the result of this, I need hardly say, was not only to confirm me in the view that I was entirely right, but to convince me that my neighbours were sunk in the slough of a dangerous heresy, in which it was my duty to preach at them whilst they slowly disappeared in the ooze of their unpardonable error.

There is something essentially English in the very name of the institution—the Box Office. About the only thing an average Box Office cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the vox populi, which is far nearer the vox Dei than the voice of the expert witness.

Before discoursing of the Box Office in its widest sense, let us return for a moment to the case of the actor. Here the Box Office must, in the nature of things, decide his fate. It is the polling booth of the playgoer, and it is the playgoer and not the critic who decides whether an actor is great or otherwise. Why do we call Garrick a great actor? Because the Box Office of his time acclaimed him one. Davies tells us how his first performance of Richard III. was received with loud and reiterated applause. How his ‘look and actions when he pronounced the words,

Off with his head: so much for Buckingham,

were so significant and important from his visible enjoyment of the incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the triumph of the actor and satisfaction of the audience.’ A modern purist would have walked out of the playhouse when his ear was insulted by Cibber’s tag; but from a theatre point of view it is a good tag, and I have always thought it a pity that Shakespeare forgot to set it down himself, and left to Cibber the burden of finishing the line. The tag is certainly deserving of this recognition that it was the line with which Garrick first captured the Box Office, and it is interesting that the best Richard III. of my generation, Barry Sullivan, always used Cibber’s version, for the joy, as I take it, of bringing down the house with ‘so much for Buckingham.’ Shakespeare was so fond of improving other folk’s work himself, and was such a keen business man, that he would certainly have adopted as his own any line capable of such good Box Office results.

Throughout Garrick’s career he was not without critics, and envious ones at that; but no one to-day doubts that the verdict of the Box Office was a right one, and it is an article of universal belief that Garrick was a great actor. Of course one does not contend that the sudden assault and capture of the Box Office by a young actor in one part is conclusive evidence of merit. As the envious Quin said: ‘Garrick is a new religion; Whitfield was followed for a time, but they would all come to church again.’ Cibber, too, shook his head at the young gentleman, but was overcome by that dear old lady, Mrs. Bracegirdle, who had left the stage thirty years before Garrick arrived. ‘Come, come, Cibber,’ she said, ‘tell me if there is not something like envy in your character of this young gentleman. The actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ The old man felt the force of this sensible rebuke; he took a pinch of snuff and frankly replied, ‘Why faith, Bracey, I believe you are right, the young fellow is clever.’

In these anecdotes you have the critic mind annoyed by the Box Office success of the actor, and the sane simple woman of the world laying down the maxim ‘the actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ And when one considers it, must it not necessarily be so? An actor can only appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at all?

So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor, my position was indisputable. Of course, there were, and are, Box Offices and Box Offices. Cibber, Quin, Macklin, and Garrick appealed to different audiences from Foote. An actor to-day has a hundred different Box Offices to appeal to, but the point and the only point is, does he succeed with the Box Office he attacks? Moreover, the more Box Offices he succeeds with and the greater the public he can amuse, the better actor he is. Garrick knew this when, in the spirit of a great artist, he said: ‘If you won’t come to Lear and Hamlet I must give you Harlequin,’ and did it with splendid success.

How was it, then, when the thing seemed so clear to my mind, there should be so many to dispute this Box Office test? The more one studied the attitude of these unbelievers, the more certain it seemed that their unbelief arose in a great measure as Cibber’s and Quin’s had arisen, namely, from a certain spirit of natural envy. It is obvious that not every one of us can achieve a great Box Office success, and that many men who live laborious lives, without much prosperity of any kind, not unnaturally dislike the success that an actor appears to attain so easily. But the suggestion that Box Office success is or can be largely attained by unworthy means is, it seems to me, a curious delusion of the envious, insulting to the generation of which we are individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that we are easily deceived and deluded, and exhibiting unpleasantly that modern pessimism that spells—or should we more accurately say smells?—degeneration. Garrick’s career is an eloquent example of the fact that a great Box Office success can only be attained by great attributes used with consummate power, and that pettiness and meanness, chicanery and bombast are not the methods approved of by the patrons of the Box Office.

Of course it will be said by the envious ‘This man is a great success to-day, wait and see what the next generation think of him.’ But why should a man act or paint or write for any other generation but his own? Common sense suggests that many men can successfully entertain their own generation, but that only the work of the rare occasional genius will survive in the future. Luckily for all artists of to-day, this is and always was a law of Nature; equally fortunate for artists of the future, that nothing that is being done to-day is in the least likely to interfere with the workings of that law in days to come.

There is undoubtedly a tendency—and probably there always has been a tendency—to infer that because a man is rich therefore he is lucky, and that a man who is successful is very likely a dishonest man; indeed, it seems a common belief that to gain the verdict of the Box Office it is necessary to do that which is unworthy. This idea being so widely spread, it appears interesting to study the Box Office in relation to other scenes in the human drama. What part does it play, for instance, in literature or art or politics?

Of course, a writer or painter is in a somewhat different position from an actor. He can, if he wishes, appeal to a much smaller circle, or, in an extreme case, he can refuse to appeal at all to the generation in which he lives and make his appeal to posterity. The statesman, however, is perhaps nearer akin to the actor. Let us consider how statesmen and politicians have regarded the Box Office, and whether it can fairly be said to have exercised a bad influence on their actions.

And as Garrick is one of the high sounding names in the world of the theatre, so Gladstone may not unfairly be taken as a type of English politician, and it is curious that the whole evolution of his mind is chiefly interesting in its gradual discovery of the fact that the Box Office is the sole test of a statesman’s merit, that the vox populi is indeed the vox Dei, and that the superior person is of no account in politics as against the will of the nation. As in the theatre, so in politics, it is the people who pay to come in who have to be catered for. In 1838, Gladstone was as superior—‘sniffy’ is the modern phrase—about the Box Office as any latter-day journalist could wish. He complimented the Speaker on putting down discussions upon the presentation of petitions. The Speaker sagely said ‘that those discussions greatly raised the influence of popular feeling on the deliberation of the House; and that by stopping them he thought a wall was erected—not as strong as might be wished.’ Young Mr. Gladstone concurred, and quoted with approval an exclamation of Roebuck’s in the House: ‘We, sir, are, or ought to be, the élite of the people of England, for mind; we are at the head of the mind of the people of England.’

It took over forty years for Gladstone to discover that his early views were a hopeless form of conceit, and that the only test of the merit of a policy was the Box Office test. But when he recognised that the élite of the people were not in the House of Commons, but were really in the pit and gallery of his audiences, he never wearied of putting forward and explaining Box Office principles with the enthusiasm, and perhaps the exaggeration, of a convert.

Take that eloquent appeal in Midlothian as an instance:

We cannot (he says) reckon on the wealth of the country, nor upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which rank and wealth usually bring. In the main these powers are against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a narrow and sectional interest—apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there we have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above all these and behind all these, there is something greater than these: there is the nation itself. This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder and still more hopeless to resist.

Now here is the Box Office test with a vengeance. Not in its soundest form, perhaps, because the really ideal manager would have found a piece and a company that would draw stalls and dress circle as well as pit and gallery. For Bacon says: ‘If a man so temper his actions as in some of them he do content every faction, the music will be the fuller.’ But Gladstone at that time had neither the piece nor the company for this, and, great artist as he was, his music did not in later years draw the stalls and dress circle; but having mastered the eternal Box Office principle, this did not disconcert him, for he knew that of the two the pit and gallery were sounder business for a manager who wanted to succeed in the provinces and was eager for a long run.

This recognition by Mr. Gladstone of the Box Office as supreme comes with especial interest when you consider that his education and instinct made it peculiarly difficult for him to appreciate the truth. Disraeli jumped at it more easily, as one might expect from a man of Hebrew descent, for that great race have always held the soundest views on questions of the Box Office. As a novelist, the novels he wrote were no doubt the best he was capable of, but whatever may be their merits or demerits, they were written with an eye to the Box Office and the Box Office responded. His first appearance upon the political stage was not a success. The pit and gallery howled at him. But this did not lead him to pretend that he despised his audience, and that they were a mob whose approval was unworthy of winning; on the contrary, he told them to their faces that ‘the time would come when they would be obliged to listen.’ A smaller man would have shrunk with ready excuse from conquering such a Box Office, but Disraeli knew that it was a condition precedent to greatness, and he intended to be great. He had no visionary ideas about the political game. As he said to a fellow-politician: ‘Look at it as you will, it is a beastly career.’ Much the same may be said in moments of despondency of any career. The only thing that ultimately sweetens the labour necessary to success is the Box Office returns, not by any means solely because of their value in money—though a man honest with himself does not despise money—but because every shilling paid into the Box Office is a straight testimonial from a fellow-citizen who believes in your work. Disraeli’s Box Office returns were colossal and deservedly so—for he had worked hard for them.

When you come to think of it seriously, the Box Office principle in the drama of politics is the right for that drama’s patrons to make its laws, a thing that this nation has contended for through the centuries. Indeed, there are only two possible methods of right choice open: either to listen to the voice of public opinion—the Box Office principle—or to leave affairs entirely to the arbitrament of chance. With sturdy English common sense we have embodied both these principles in an excellent but eccentric constitution. We allow public opinion to choose the members of the House of Commons, and leave the choice of members of the House of Lords entirely to chance. To an outside observer both methods seem to give equally satisfactory results.

In political matters we find that for all practical purposes the Box Office reigns supreme. No misguided political impresario to-day would plant some incompetent young actor into a star part because he was a member of his own family. We may be thankful that all parties openly recognise that any political play to be produced must please the pit and gallery, and that any statesman actor, to be a success, must play to their satisfaction. No one wants the stalls and dress circle of the political circus to be empty, but it would be absurd to let a small percentage of the audience exercise too great an influence on the productions of the management.

As in politics, so in business, for here no sane man will be heard to deny that the Box Office test is the only test of merit. If the balance sheet is adverse, the business man may be a man of culture, brain-power, intellect, sentiment and good manners, but as a business man he is not a success, and Nature kindly extinguishes him and automatically removes him from a field of energy for which he is unfitted. It is really unfortunate that one cannot have a moral, social, and literary Bankruptcy Court, where, applying the Box Office test, actors, authors, artists, and statesmen might file their petitions and be adjudged politically, or histrionically, or artistically bankrupt, as the case might be, and obtain a certificate of the Court, permitting them to open a fried-fish shop, to start a newspaper, or to enter upon some simpler occupation which, upon evidence given, it might appear they are really fitted for.

It is the vogue to-day for those claiming to possess the literary and artistic temperament to shrink with very theatrical emphasis from the Box Office. They point out how the Box Office of to-day overrules the Box Office of yesterday, forgetting that the Box Office of to-morrow may reinstate the judgment of the inferior Court. Even if the Box Office is as uncertain as the law, it is also as powerful as the law. Of course a painter or writer has the advantage over the actor—if it be one—of appealing to a smaller Box Office to-day, in the hopes of attracting a large Box Office to-morrow. A man can write and paint to please a coming generation, but a man cannot act, or bring in Bills in Parliament, or bake or brew, or make candlesticks for anyone else than his fellow living men. Not that, for myself, I think there have ever been many writers or artists who wrote and painted for future generations. On the contrary, they wrote and painted largely to please themselves, but in so far as they cared for their wives and children, with an eye on the Box Office, and in most cases it was only because their business arrangements were mismanaged that their own generations failed to pay to come in. These failures were the exception. The greatest men, such as Shakespeare and Dickens, were immediate Box Office successes—others were Box Office successes in their own day, but have not stood the test of time. Nevertheless, it is something to succeed at any Box Office, even if the success be only temporary. Every man cannot be a Prime Minister, but is that any reason why he should not aspire to a seat on the Parish Council? When one turns to the lives of authors and artists, one does not find that the wisest and best were men who despised the test of the Box Office.

Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern craze among the cognoscenti to assess the ability of a writer or an artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his own generation.

If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box Office success.

Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature, writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:

I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays, or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am ensured for that writing in every number, a certain sum of money.

That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself. As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of America:

To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth.

Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to pretend that he despised it.

Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle. He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs of genius at the hands of publishers.

What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad, saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals, but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.

One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’ as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and recognition have produced the best work that has been done.

Nor do we find that the painter is in this matter less sensible than his artistic brethren. The late Sir John Millais expresses very accurately the sensible spirit in which all great artists attend to the varied voices of critics as against the unanimous voice of the Box Office.

I have now lost all hope of gaining just appreciation in the Press; but thank goodness ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ Nothing could have been more adverse than the criticism on ‘The Huguenot,’ yet the engraving is now selling more rapidly than any other of recent time. I have great faith in the mass of the public, although one hears now and then such grossly ignorant remarks.

The artist then gives instances of public criticism in other arts with which he disagrees; but the only matter that I am concerned with is that in his own art, and for himself, he has arrived at the Box Office conclusion that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed, or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no necessity of appealing to that institution for support.

If I had been asked to name any writer of my own time who was absolutely free from any truck with the Box Office, I should, before I had read his charming autobiography, have suggested Herbert Spencer. For indeed one would not expect to find a Box Office within the curtilage of a cathedral or a laboratory. Religion and science and their preachers have necessarily very little to do with the Box Office.

But Spencer was not only a great writer, but a keen scientific analyst of the facts of human life. He could not deceive himself—as so many of the literary folk do—as to his aims and objects. Looking back on the youthful valleys of his life from the calm mountain slopes that a man may rest on at the age of seventy-three, he asks himself

What have been the motives prompting my career? how much have they been egotistic, and how much altruistic? That they have been mixed there can be no doubt. And in this case, as in most cases, it is next to impossible to separate them mentally in such a way as to preserve the relations of amount among them. So deep down is the gratification which results from the consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is impossible for anyone to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case, the desire for such recognition has not been absent.

He continues to point out that this desire for recognition was ‘not the primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive of my larger and later efforts,’ and concludes, ‘Still, as I have said, the desire of achievement, and the honour which achievement brings, have doubtless been large factors.’

It is very interesting to note that a man like Herbert Spencer recognises what a large part the Box Office played in his own work—work which was rather the work of a scientist than the work of a literary man.

In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached, emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye may obtain.’

These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery, is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.

It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the Box Office principle.