THE FOOTLIGHT FAVORITES.
BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.
IN the December ICONOCLAST there appeared a tirade on
"The Stage and Stage Degenerates" that was as sweeping
in its assertions as it was narrow in its views. The
writer revels in reminiscences of his newspaper associations
with the cheap beer-drinking, sand-floor class, swings
their vices and vulgarities before the public, describes
them as garbed in "loud patterned" trousers and snow-white overcoats and epitomizes the whole thing as an
Augean stable, impure, impossible, vile, vulgar and bad. He
then tells us calmly that "these are the representatives of
their profession, so far as America is concerned," and he
gives them to us as the "middle class of the people of
the footlights."
If these are the "middle class," what is the next grade
below? Where does he place the dividing line? Does he
make no distinction between the vaudeville, continuous
performance buffoons and the thousands who are "not stars,"
but working well and perhaps hoping? Does he call our
scullery-maids and stable-boys "representative American
middle class?" Does he call Mable Strickland and other
dainty little hard-workers in minor parts typical of the
hideous coarseness and vice he has described? Does he
bracket them with his beer-drunk, easy-virtue "chorus-girls?" Does he realize all he means when he says of
those he depicts "there were no stars among them, and
none of the lower stratum?" Briefly, did he know what
he was writing about?
When a man sits down on a curb stone with his feet in
the gutter to "study life" and imagines himself a
philosopher, while he moralizes on the muddy feet that pass
him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of
some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's
filth and he was informed that much depended upon
one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not
Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is
apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to
gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall habitues and fleshling courtesans.
This an age of work and a generation of workers. The
times, the conditions, the needs of the century are driving
women out into the world as never before in the world's
history. They must work to live and to help others live
and in every line of work possible is woman found. The
stage gives employment to thousands of women eminently
fitted to entertain and amuse the public. Under ordinary
conditions the great army of players find its lot a not
unpleasant one. Women bears its harness lightly, to whom
manual labor would be a mental and physical crucifixion.
It is a labor of brain as well as body, of the soul as well
as the senses, of the artistic as well as the prosaic. Its
temptations are many and its pitfalls are many, but they
are little, if any, more than are the temptations in many
other fields of self-support for women. And notwithstanding
the gentleman's profound deductions, there are a
number of good women on the American stage even if they
are not "given credit for being so by their fellow
professionals"—and iconoclastic writers. And by these I do
not mean the weary females described by Lizzie Annandale
as reclining on the shoulders of their men companions,
in mal-adorous day coaches on cross-continent
"jumps." These women, if he will pardon the contradiction,
are not the "representative middle class of the Amercan
stage." They are the scullery-maid class, for they
are on the lowest rung of the professional ladder and few
ever ascend from that lowest rung. It is their native
element.
But these women who are neither "stars or the lower
stratum," who study and labor, even though the labor be
light through being one of love for their profession, who
give a refinement and a sweetness to the many little dramas
that appeal to critique and common folk alike, who speak
to us of wife and sister and mother and sweetheart, and
whose voices are as sweet and gestures as gentle and personalities
as refined as are those of our own home women
nestling safe in the firelight of our ingle-nook—these
women are not immoral in a ratio of "ten to one." And
with them, as with our home women, it is not their sense
of morality that is their greatest safe-guard. It is their
sense of refinement. It is a mistake to think that only
Christian and moral women are virtuous. "Passion leaps
o'er cold decree," and Christian precepts and moral teaching
are cold and distant things when the blood leaps like
molton lava through heart and brain. With Marguerite
telling her beads, the prayers become but a babble of empty
sound on her lips when the sweet poison of her lover's
teachings crept through ear and heart and opened to her
wondering, frightened dreams a Paradise of sense and
sound and sweetness and dreamy, swooning loveliness before
which her pictured pearl and golden heaven waxed chill
and distant and austere. Prayers did not save Francesca
from the sweet torment of her Passion and her Purgatory.
Prayers save but rarely, for they are to darkness and to
mystery that give back only the awful weight of silence—
silence under which the frantic heart struggles and stifles
as beneath a pall. Prayers reach out to an infinity that
is shrouded always, but the lover's lips are sweet and the
caress is close and the arms are warm and human. What
wonder if the brain forgets when the heart thirsts and
pleads? What wonder if the reason waver and faint when
the winged god nestles close in the breast? What woman
if the woman wake and thrill and "answers to the touch
of one musician's hand" as an instrument that is silent
till the master touch sweep the strings? What wonder if
the marble warm and waken and throb to quick life
beneath the passion of Pygmalion's kiss? What wonder if
women love with an answering love if their God have so
created? And what wonder if their prayer to him faint
on their lips beneath the surging diapason of the waking
heart beneath? If he so created, what then? If he "saw
them made and said 'twas good," what then? If he made
love chief, to deity and then destroy, its ecstacy blending
with agony "as swells and swoons, across the wold the
tinkling of the camel's bell," what then? If he made the
greatest thing in the world and life speaks to life as a
magnet to the pole, what then? Can you break that
strong, silent current by a breathed invocation? Did not
the Man cry from the cross in his exquisite agony, "Eli,
Eli, lama sabachthani!" And if his divine faith fainted
on the threshold of his kingdom, is it strange if human
faith sink beneath life's crucifixion and the babble of
priest grow poor and harsh before the sweetness of "a
little laughter and a little love"—the only hyssop in the
sponge of vinegar? And we wander so far to find so
little!
In Jean Paul's cry "How lonely is everyone in this wide
charnal of the universe!"—is the explanation of—much.
We are as we are. And Allah is great.
And because we are as we are, it is fallacy to think
that the good women, in the accepted sense of the term,
are the only virtuous ones. Women of the stage and of
the world ponder little on Moses and the prophets. Their
lives are too full of grinding fact to reck much of
unsubstantial fancies. And Prayer and Priest save women from
little if Personality be not there. Teachings of virtue
and morality are lip service and things of air. But when
a woman's self rises to defend her honor—an honor that
is a sacred thing in its own worth, not a question that
will but win her reward in other life, then does true morality
speak and then does woman find her greatest safeguard.
A woman is but a weak thing who must cower
behind the skirts of her religion to guard her purity. And
these women of the stage who are its "middle class" are
also its gentlewomen. For unfortunately its "stars"
many of them but rival the other "stratum" in lawless
infamy. In that, did the writer in December make his
supreme mistake.
Temptation in the footlight world is strong, but a
woman's pride is stronger. Under temptation's test, her
religion might was dim, but her refinement would rise as a
battlement in defense. Her church and creed might waver
and sink, but that undefinable innocence which we call
womanhood, would lead her, a Dian, through the fires of
hell. In society and the slums a large percentage of women
are courtesans by choice. The one has a refinement that is
but a veneer, and the other has no refinement at all. And
as with the world, so with the stage. In the middle class
are found the truer gentlewomen. Women of the drama
must of necessity be gentlewomen, the refinement must be
innate, or they would fail utterly. An actress who is a
gentlewoman can with her art stoop to portray sin, but
an actress who is a common woman cannot rise to portray
a refinement of which her coarse nature has no conception.
Mrs. Kendal a woman who is as the wife of Caesar, can
become a "Second Mrs. Tanguery" before the footlights.
But Lizzie Annadale's chorus girl could never enact
the rôleo f a Mrs. Kendal on or off the stage. The
former is a comparatively light task. The latter is an
impossibility. And because they are refined women, though
not necessarily "good" women, are they as a class
virtuous women. Their instinctive womanhood would shrink
from an impure life as quickly as they would lift their
skirts from the mire of the gutter. The deadly chill of
physical repulsion would be as strong in one case as in
the other. In individual cases they have "sinned" as
we term it, but qui voulez vous! The ratio on the stage
is little larger than that of the world's middle class and
not at all larger than that of the world's society women.
I also object to those wild fanatics who would "elevate the
stage," not because it would be Herculean labor, but
because the aforesaid fanatics would find larger and more
fruitful fields for their efforts in the shadow of their own
church spire. Let them leave the women of the footlights
alone and turn their attention to the women in the boxes.
It would give a bored public relief and be distinctly and
beautifully amusing—as an experiment.
Waco, Texas, December 11, 1897.
