THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS
Gilbert Seldes
The Damned Effrontery of the Two-A-Day
(pages 249-263)
THE narrator of the following episode is Mr Percy Hammond of the New York Tribune;
the stars are Montgomery and Stone; the Mr Mansfield is Richard himself again, the actor who played
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde better than Thomas E. Shea did:
"As the stars appeared in the last act in evening dress, Mr Mansfield turned to me and with
venomous indignation said, 'That is damned effrontery!' It seemed to be Mr Mansfield's belief that mere
dancers had no right to wear the vestments of refined society."
To me that is a very funny story and the humour of it has nothing to do with upon what meat has
this our Caesar fed that he is grown so great. The eminence of Mansfield and the worthlessness of
Montgomery and Stone may be assumed; the recrudescence of the mediaeval attitude toward strolling
players, even if it be in the mind of another player, is also conceivable; snobbism is always conceivable
and often interesting. The story is funny because it so perfectly illustrates the genteel tradition in
America. (I am rather freely applying Mr Santayana's phrase, without any effort to do it justice.)
Montgomery and Stone were in revue or extravaganza, and were therefore outcast; they didn't count as
Art. Whereas Mr Mansfield played Shakespeare and high-school girls went to see him, and so
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he was Art. The application to vaudeville is immediate, because vaudeville is considered on
Broadway as the grave of artistic reputations. An actor of established prestige may venture
into vaudeville; he usually makes his audience feel exactly how far he has condescended to appear
before them and accept, even if he doesn't earn, a salary three times as great as usual; but the actor
in the middle distance very well knows that if he goes into vaudeville he is digging his own grave,
because there is a stigma attached to the two-a-day. Vaudeville players, in short, are not entitled to
"the vestments of refined society." About every ten years the corrupt desire to be refined takes hold
of vaudeville itself; but it dies out quickly and vaudeville remains simple and good.
It is in one of the stages of simple goodness now, and I propose to discuss it without reference
to a possibly more noble past. I am well acquainted with the other method, which was founded, I
believe, by Arthur Symons, and beautifully practised by him. To him we owe the peculiarly
attractive attitude of sentimental reminiscence which, invented or borrowed by him, has become
classic. It leads to excellent prose at times, and by showing that there was a golden age even in
vaudeville sometimes creates the suspicion that vaudeville itself need not be all brass. But the
attitude is unsatisfactory because it invokes, in dealing with the most immediate of the minor arts,
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more than a share of the pathos of distance. Vaudeville is brightly coloured, zestful, with sharp
outlines; and the classic attitude softens and blurs. It is required of you to name and describe the acts
and numbers of a better day; one must say "musichall" or be slain in the passages of the Jordan;
in America a reference to the commedia dell'arte is, as scientists say, indicated. Yet the time
must come when it is possible to say, "Vaudeville is. Surely it could never have been worse than this-or
for that matter, never better. Let us regard it as it is." The moment must come in the history of general
culture when vaudeville can be taken without comparisons. That is, it happens, the only way I can take
it, for in my youth I saw little of it and cared less. I recall a skit called Change Your Act or Go Back
to the Woods; there were Fours and among them were Cohans; there was, I remember, The Man
Who Made the Shah of Persia Laugh; once I saw an artist in pantomime. Yet I am not moved to beat
my breast and begin Einst in meinen Jugendjahren. Nothing I have heard leads me to believe
that there were better days in vaudeville than those which open benignant and wide over Joe Cook and
Fanny Brice and the Six Brown Brothers, over the two Briants and Van and Schenck and the four
Marxes and the Rath Brothers and the team of Williams and Wolfus; over Duffy and Sweeney and
Johnny Dooley and Harry Watson, Jr., as Young Kid Battling
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Dugan, and Messrs Moss and Frye, who ask how high is up.
I shall arrive in a moment at the question of refined vaudeville, a thing I dislike intensely; there
is another sort of refinement in vaudeville which demands respect. It is the refinement of
technique. It seems to me that the unerring taste of Fanny Brice's impersonations is at least partly
due to, and has been achieved through, the purely technical mastery she has developed; I am sure
that the vaudeville stage makes such demands upon its artists that they are compelled to perfect
everything. They have to do whatever they do swiftly, neatly, without lost motion; they must touch
and leap aside; they dare not hold an audience more than a few minutes, at least not with the same
stunt; they have to establish an immediate contact, set a current in motion, and exploit it to the last
possible degree in the shortest space of time. They have to be always "in the picture," for though
the vaudeville stage seems to give them endless freedom and innumerable opportunities, it-holds
them to strict account; it permits no fumbling, and there are no reparable errors. The materials they
use are trivial, yes; but the treatment must be accurate to a hair's breadth; the wine they serve is
light, it must fill the goblet to the very brim, and not a drop must spill over. There is no great
second act to redeem a false entrance; no grand climacteric to make up for even a moment's
dulness.
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The whole of the material must be subsumed in the whole of the presentation, every page has to be
written, every scene rendered, every square inch of the canvas must be painted,
not daubed with paint. It is, of course, obvious, that the responsibility in this case is exactly that of the
major arts. It is at least tenable that in this case, as in the major arts, the responsibilities are fulfilled.
And nothing could be more illuminating than the moments in vaudeville when the tricky and the
bogus appear. I face here willingly the protest of intelligent men and women who have gone to
vaudeville to see or hear one turn and have sat through some of the dreariest aesthetic dancing,' have
heard the most painfully polite vocalism, have witnessed "drama." If vaudeville requires half of what I
have said, how do these things get in and get by! Largely as a concession to debased public taste. Note
well that all the culture elements in vaudeville, the dull and base and truly vulgar ones, are
importations. The dance appropriate to the vaudeville stage is the stunt dance; its Proper music is
ragtime or jazz; the playlet which belongs to it (witness the success of A Slice of Life) is
burlesque. Yet like every other popular art in America, vaudeville is required, by the tradition of
gentility, to be cultural; and its dull defenders often make it their boast that it does
[1] Heywood Broun has discovered that everybody in vaudeville is an "artist" except the trained seal.
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give culture to the masses (the same sort of thing is heard in connexion with the music played at
moving-picture houses) because among its native acts appear tableaux vivants out of Landseer
or because a legitimate actor brings to the common herd scraps and snatches of Les
Misérables. The process continues, regrettably, and extends to the spoiling of good
vaudeville material. It isn't a loss of anything precious, except time which could be filled by something
better, when Mr Lou Tellegen struts about on the variety stage; it is a defamation of something good in
the major line and equally a loss of moments when the "Affairs of" Anatol are inexpertly and
tastelessly produced "for vaudeville." But what shall we say of such a real disaster as the return of Miss
Ethel Levey to vaudeville, still so rich in attraction that she plays four weeks at the Palace in New
York, wholly spoiled for variety because she has had a triumph abroad and has become a "great actress"
or is it "an artiste"? There was in Miss Levey something roughly elemental, something common
and pure; whatever she did had broadness and sharpness both. Corrupted by her success abroad, she
returns still magnificent, the voice still throbbing, the form heavy but dominant-yet no longer
vaudeville. She has the grandeur of a star and appears in full stage with a grand piano and silk-shaded
lamps and draperies and sings All by Myself with shocking bad sentimental acting, and
gets all she can out
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VAUDEVILLE. By Charles Demuth
of Love's Old Sweet Song before the touch of her old spirit protests-and recites a dramatic
monologue entitled Destiny! Now and again flashes of burlesque reveal her ancient flavour; but
it is an axiom in vaudeville that you can't be good in it if you are too good for it.
I omit the people who aren't, simply, good enough; there are second-rate people in vaudeville as in
everything else, and first-rate people of its second order. The part that is pure, I am convinced,
is rarely matched on our other stages. Certainly not in the legitimate, nor in the serious artistic
playhouse where knowing one's job perfectly and doing it simply and unpretentiously are the rarest
things in the world. Revue and musical comedy require and often attain the pitch of technical accuracy
which vaudeville sets as a standard, and these two forms draw heavily upon vaudeville for material and
stars, whom they incorporate only in so far as the stars are not pure variety themselves. They are as
much entitled to the jazz bands as any other stage, but to me a jazz band is not essentially variety,
although it has a legitimate place there. That is why I reject Mr Walter Haviland's ranking of Ted Lewis
as one of the greatest of vaudeville acts, for the great acts in vaudeville are those which could not be
perfectly appreciated elsewhere. (The aesthetics of the question have been canvassed in Laokoön,
I believe.) Johnny Dooley, who always breaks up the show in
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musical comedy, is a real vaudeville player, and Jack Donahue, who was the sole attraction of an-
other such piece, is always right, his fumbling for words is inspired, and so is his dancing, and
altogether it is a completely realized act. Among the most popular of the big-time acts I am left
cold by Van and Schenck, who are perpetually stopping short of perfection; their songs are funny,
but not witty; their music is current, -no more; their rendition is always near enough right to be
passed. The Four Marx Brothers do better in creating their special atmosphere of low comedy; the
Six Brown Brothers are at the very top with their saxophones. It is an independent act, wholly
self-contained, not nearly so appropriate in any other framework, except possibly a one-ring circus;
it is a real variety turn where a jazz band is only half and half; and in the case of these performers
everything they do is exquisite.
It isn't possible to describe the acts, nor even to suggest the distinctive quality of the
head-liners. There are inexplicable things in vaudeville, things no rational explanation can touch,
such as the persistence of sawing a woman in half, or the terrific impact of the singing of Belle
Baker, who destroys you with Elie! Elie! Houdini is variety as all magicians are and all
tricksters-the circus side of vaudeville, to be sure, and the sensational side. Here belong the
acrobats; I have written elsewhere of the Rath
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Brothers, who alone are in the spirit and tone of vaudeville, without any intrusion of the circus. At the
present moment nearly everything in vaudeville which is best has a touch of parody; not infrequently it
burlesques itself. Herbert Williams, of Williams and Wolfus, exaggerates wholly in the manner of a
clown; his despairing cry for the "spotli-i-i-ght," his wail of unhappiness, with his appearance,
his gesture, his shambling walk, make him a figure out of the commedia dell'arte-one of the
few in vaudeville. Duffy and Sweeney are parodists of their métier; their whole fun is in
their elaborate pretense of not caring to amuse the audience. Harry Watson, Jr., has taken out of
burlesque the accentuated form, the built-up face, the wide and fatuous gesture peculiar to that type,
and in his broken-down prize-fighter has created a real character with his jumping the rope "fi' thousand
conseggitiv times" and "tell 'em what I did to Philadelphia Jack O'Brien." I am dragged into a catalogue
of names, which I want to avoid; but I cannot omit the macabre Moving-Man's Dream of the Briants,
the rustic studies of Chic Sale, the elaborate burlesque of melodrama by Charles Withers, and the
exceptional mad magician of Frank Van Hoven. Van Hoven carries farther than anyone else the
appearance of not knowing the audience is to be amused. He complains in a mutter of the presence of
human beings, individually probably all right, but en masse . . . ! He leaves the stage and passes
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out of the auditorium, bidding the audience amuse itself while he's gone. And his great finale, with
a bowl of goldfish, a handkerchief in a trunk, a table covered with a cloth, an inflated paper bag,
and a revolver shot-at the sound of which exactly nothing happens, is the last word in destroying
the paraphernalia of the magician and all his works.
I have committed myself to the statement that Joe Cook is perfect and am in no mood to
withdraw it. As vaudeville he is perfect; I can see him in no other milieu because he lacks
the gift-not needed in vaudeville, though useful there-of holding the audience in his hand. He is
liked, not loved; his act is met with continuous chuckles, smiles, and laughter; seldom with
guffaws. This is not necessarily to his credit; it means that he does one sort of thing, and does it
extremely well. It happens to be just the thing for which vaudeville is made. As Ethel Levey is
what most vaudeville players aspire to be, so Cook is what they ought to be. He is exactly right.
Yet to give the quality of his rightness is difficult. To recognize it is easier.
He is versatile, but not in the manner of Sylvester Schaeffer. He is a master of parody and
burlesque, yet not in the fashion of Charles Withers; his delicate impersonations have an ease and
certainty far beyond the studies of Chic Sale. Essentially what distinguishes Joe Cook is that he is
very wise and slightly mad, and his madness is not the "dippy" kind
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so admirably practised by Frank Van Hoven. It is structural. Mr Cook's is probably the longest single
act in vaudeville, and after it is over he saunters into one or more of the acts that follow his on the
programme, as his fancy takes him.
His own starts as a running parody of old-time vaudeville, beginning with the musicians coming
out of the pit, through the magician and the player of instruments to-but no one has ever discovered
where it does go to. For after the card tricks-the ace of spades is asked for and, as he remarks af ter five
minutes of agonized fumbling behind his back, the ace of spades is asked for and practically at a
moment's notice the ace of spades is produced; and it never is-Mr Cook finds it necessary to explain to
the audience in one of the most involved pieces of nonsense ever invented why he will not imitate four
Hawaiians playing the ukulele. After that literally nothing matters. He might be with Alice in
Wonderland or at a dada ballet or with the terribly logical clowns of Shakespeare. I think that Chaplin
would savour his humours.
In an art which is hard and bright and tends to glitter rather than radiate, he has a gleam of poetry;
but he is like the best of poets because there are no fuzzy edges, no blurred contours; he is exact and his
precision is never cold. He holds conversations of an imbecile gravity: How are you? How are
you? Fine, how's yourself? Good. And you? Splendid.
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How's your uncle? I haven't got an uncle. Fine, how is he? He's fine. How are you? He is
amazingly inventive, creating new stunts, writing new lines, doing fresh business from week to week.
His little bits are like witty epigrams in verse, where the thing done and the skill of the method coincide
and pleasing separately please more by their fusion. His sense of the stage is equalled by but one man I
have ever seen: George M. Cohan.
Had I had any doubts about vaudeville as we practice it in the United States they would have been
dispelled in the past two years by one great success and one notable failure: the Chauve-Souris
of Balieff and the show of the Forty-niners. Balieff seemed for a moment to be destroying B. F. Keith;
here was something certainly vaudeville, with turns and numbers, appealing to every grade of
intelligence; here were good music, exciting scenery, and good fun; here were voices caressing the ear
and dancers dazzling the eye; here was a gay burlesque and a sophisticated conférencier.
Now if our native product were only like that . . . (the implication was, Wouldn't we just go every
day to the nearest vaudeville house!). Then, to be sure, a reaction. Put Ed Wynn and Leon Errol and . . .
I omit the list-Wynn was almost unanimously chosen as conférencier -and we could give
the Russians at least a good run for the money-and it was money, loads
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of it, much to their surprise. And then, without Ed Wynn and the list, the attempt; for the Forty-niners
were cheerfully setting out to be a company of Americans stranded in Russia, giving the Russians to
understand what the folk and popular arts of America were. Months earlier the thing had been perfectly
done, as a game, in the No-Siree, a wholly amateur single performance which was without
doubt the gayest evening of the year in New York. (The tribute is not exactly wrung from me, for
friends of mine were concerned in it; it was the high moment of the Algonquin Circle and they should
have disbanded the following morning. Since I was not an adherent of the group, my advice was not
asked; I do not know whether it still exists, has passed to further triumphs, or has repeated the
Forty-niners.) Put on professionally, high class vaudeville showed all the weaknesses of the commercial
kind, and had a dulness of its own. The Dance of the Small-town Mayors was exactly right, but most of
the parodies were outdated, the burlesques were too voulus, the strain too great. There was
lacking that technical proficiency which is essential to vaudeville, and the adjustment of means to
material was sloppy. One fell back on Balieff and discovered, as the exoticism wore off, that he too had
his weak points. Sentimental songs in however beautiful voices, the choreographics of figures come to
life from Copenhagen plate however accurately the footfall coincided with Anitra's Dance, and a
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number of other things suggested that in Russia, too, refinement could corrupt and stultify. There
remained elements we could not match: we hadn't encouraged our legitimate stage sufficiently to
be justified in expecting cubist settings in vaudeville; nor when we heard American folk music
(and its contemporary form in ragtime) did we so earnestly applaud as to keep them fresh in
variety shows. Balieff never was "variety," and we asked of variety that it be like him; we missed
the meaning of Balieff as surely as we appreciated the fun. For he was a lesson not to vaudeville,
but to us, to those of us who left vaudeville in the hands of the least cultivated audiences. We have
asked nothing of vaudeville simply because we haven't suspected what it had to give. Yet week
after week at the Palace Theatre in New York there have been bills equal in entertainment to the
average Balieff programme; there has been evident an expertness in technique, a skill in
construction, a naturalness of execution, a soundness of sense and judgement, which ought to have
appealed to all who had taste and discrimination. The people who do go there have something, at
least; and lack snobbism generally. If the audiences of the Theatre Guild and the Neighborhood
Playhouse were to add themselves to their number, were to accept what is given and be receptive
to something more, it could not hurt vaudeville. Because like everything else variety must grow,
and there is no
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reason why it should shut itself off from the direction of civilized life. It can exist very well
without the Theatre Guild audience; I wonder whether that audience can exist as well without
variety.
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