II. – THE AMUSEMENTS OF THE PEOPLE
The Middlesex magistrates have shut up the Argyle Rooms. Mr. Bignell, who has found it worth his while to invest £80,000 in the place, it is to be presumed, is much annoyed, and has, in some respects, reason to be so. Year after year noble lords and Middlesex magistrates have visited the place, and have licensed it. Indeed, it had become one of the institutions of the country – one of the places which Bob Logic and Corinthian Tom (for such men still exist, though they go by other names) would be sure to visit, and such as they and the women who were habitués will have to go elsewhere. It is said a great public scandal is removed, but the real scandal yet remains. It is a scandal that such a place ever flourished in the great metropolis of a land which professes Christianity – which pays clergymen and deans, and bishops and archbishops princely sums to extirpate that lust of the flesh and lust of the eye and pride of life, which found their lowest form of development in the Argyle Rooms. It was a scandal that men of position, who have been born in English homes and nursed by English mothers, and been consecrated Christians in baptism, and have been trained at English public schools and universities, and worshipped in English churches and cathedrals, should have helped to make the Argyle a flourishing institution. Mr. Bignell created no vice – he merely pandered to what was in existence. It was men of wealth and fashion who made the Argyle what it was. The Argyle closed, the vice remains the same, and it will avail little to make clean the outside of the whited sepulchre if within there be rottenness and dead men’s bones. Be that as it may, there are few people who will regret the defeat of Mr. Bignell and the closing of the Argyle. It was not an improving spectacle in an age that has sacrificed everything to worldly show, and that has come to regard brougham as the one thing needful – as the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace – as a charter of respectability to everyone who rides in it, whether purchased by the chastity of woman or the honour of man – to see painted and bedizened females, most of them
Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred,
driving up in broughams from St. John’s Wood or Chelsea or Belgravia, with their gallants, or “protectors,” to the well-known rendezvous, at a late hour, to leave a little later for the various oyster-rooms in the district, through a dense crowd of lookers-on, drunk or sober, poor or rich, old or young, as the case might be. In no other capital in Europe was such a sight to be seen. The lesson taught by such a spectacle was neither moral nor improving at first sight, and it was not well that a young, giddy girl, with good looks, and wishing, above all things, for fine dresses and gay society – sick at heart of her lowly home and the dreary drudgery of daily poverty – should there practically have learnt that if she could but make up her mind to give her virtue to the winds, there awaited her the companionship of men of birth and breeding and wealth, and the gaudy, if short-lived, pomps and splendours of successful vice. It is true that in the outside crowd there were, in rags and tatters, in degradation and filth, shivering with cold, pale with want, hideous with intemperance and disease, homeless and friendless and destitute, withered hags old before their time, whom the policeman shrank from touching as he bade them move on, who once were the admired of the Argyle, and the pets and protégées of England’s gilded youth; and here and there in the crowd, with boots in holes and broken hat, and needy coat buttoned as far as possible to the chin to conceal the absence of a shirt, with hands thrust in empty pockets, sodden in face and feeble of limb, were men who had been hauled from the Argyle to Bow Street and the gaol. It is true thus side by side were the bane and the antidote; but when did youth, flushed with wine and pleasure, pause on the road to ruin? Young says:
All men think all men mortal but themselves,
and in like manner each man or woman in the glow of youth feels confident that he or she can never fall, and thus rushes madly on, ignoring the eternal truth that there is a Nemesis ever tracking the steps of the wrongdoer, one from whose grasp we can never escape, that the pleasures of sin are but for a season, and that the wages of sin are death. By the beery dissipated crowd outside, I say, this obvious fact had been lost sight of. What they wanted to see was the women and the men as they turned out into the streets or drove away. Well, that sight exists no longer, and to a certain extent it is a gain. The Haymarket in these latter days was very different and a much more sober place than it was when the Marquis of Waterford played his drunken pranks at Bob Croft’s, or when the simple Windham was in the habit of spending his time and wasting his money and degrading an honoured name at such a place as Barns’s or The Blue Posts. Men not far advanced in life can remember the Piccadilly Saloon, with its flashy women and medical students and barristers from the Temple, and men about town and greenhorns from the country – who in the small hours turned out into the streets, shouting stentoriously, “We won’t go home till morning,” and putting their decision into execution by repairing to the wine and coffee rooms which lined both sides of the Haymarket and existed in all the adjacent streets. In some there was a piano, at which a shabby performer was hired to keep up the harmony of the evening and to give an appearance of hilarity to what was after all a very slow affair. In others the company were left to their own resources. At a certain hour the police inspector, with a couple of constables, would look in, and it was comic to see how unconscious he was apparently that every trace of intoxicating drink had been removed, as nothing remained on the tables but a few harmless cups of coffee. It was not till the industrious world had risen to the performance of its daily task that the rag-tag and bob-tail of the Haymarket retired to roost; and by the time that earls and holy bishops and godly clergy were ready to drive down the Haymarket to take part in meetings at Exeter Hall to send the Gospel to the heathen abroad, not a trace was left of the outrageous display the night before of the more fearful and sadder forms of heathenism at home. Undoubtedly the Haymarket thirty or forty years ago was an awful place; undoubtedly it will be a little quieter now that the Argyle Rooms are closed, and as the glory of Windmill-street has fled. Undoubtedly we have gained a great deal externally by magisterial action. Yet it is evident we need something more than magisterial sanction for the interference of the police. I am not partial to the men in blue. I doubt their efficacy as agents for moral reform or the introduction of the millennium. They can remove the symptoms, but they cannot touch the disease. It seems to me that they often interfere – especially in the case of poor women – when there is no occasion to do so; and no one, when it is requisite, can be more stolidly blind and deaf and dumb than your ordinary policeman. Police surveillance must mean more or less police bribery. It was once my fate to live in a country town and to belong to a library, which was also supported by the superintendent of police. On one occasion I had a book which had previously been in that gentleman’s hands. In opening it a letter fell out addressed to him. I did what I ought not to have done, but as it was wide open, I read it, as anyone would. It was from a publican in the town, begging the superintendent’s acceptance of a cask of cider. Of course, on the next licensing-day no complaint would be heard as to the character of that house. A journeyman engineer, in his “Habits and Customs of the Working Classes,” gives us similar testimony as he describes a drinking party during prohibited hours disturbed by the appearance of a policeman, but reassured when told by the landlord that he is one of “the right sort;” which means, continues the author, that “he is one of that tolerably numerous sort who, provided a publican ‘tips’ them a ‘bob’ occasionally, and is liberal in the matter of drops of something short when they are on night duty, will not see any night-drinking that may be carried on in his establishment as long as it is done with a show of decency.” I need say no more on that head; human nature is the same all the world over. Out of the heart are the issues of life, and no policeman or magistrate can make a drunken people sober, or a low, sordid, and sensual race of men and women noble and pure in thought and beautiful in life. For that we look to the Christian Church in all its branches. To its ministers especially we appeal. Let them leave theological wrangling, and the cloister where no living voice is heard, and the well-lined study in which human nature, when it puts in an appearance, has learned to assume a decent and decorous mask, and see what are the amusements of the people, not so much on the Sabbath-day, but on the week-night. The Argyle was but one place out of many. In our great cities there are tens of thousands who live only for amusement, whether they be the working classes or in the higher walks of life. A glance at some of these places of resort may help us to understand what are the amusements of the people, and whether the Church does well and wisely in stamping them with her approval, or regarding them with her frown. It is how a man spends his money, and not how he makes it, that is the true index to his character. It is really impossible to imagine amusements more foolish or more indicative of a low tone of mind morally and intellectually than those which are most patronised at the present day. What pleasure can there be in watching a man walking for a bet, or in a woman risking her neck on a trapeze? Yet thousands go to see such a sight. Even the theatres delight in displays equally revolting, perhaps more so from a moral point of view.
When General Grant was in Moscow lately, an acrobat placed four bottles on a high table, and on top of these a chair, which he balanced sideways while he stood on his head on one corner of it. He kept repeating this, adding one chair at a time, until he got five on top of each other, and still showed no signs of stopping; but General Grant got up and walked away, saying he would rather read the death in the papers than witness it. Our music-hall audiences are far more appreciative of the amusements provided for them.
The stage, I have said, may not escape censure. It has its illustrious exceptions, but, as Mr. Chatterton has shown us, Shakespeare means bankruptcy, and the majority of adaptations from the French are, it is admitted on all hands, not of an improving character. The way also in which the powers of the licenser are administered is, to say the least, puzzling. It is impossible to represent some subjects on the stage without injury to the morals and the manners of the spectators. In Mr. Arthur Matthison’s adaptation of “Les Lionnes Pauvres,” the sin of adultery was, it is true, held up to execration; but the license was withheld because it was deemed undesirable to turn the English theatre into a spectacular divorce court. Another prohibited play was founded on “La Petite Marquise,” in which faithlessness to the marriage vow becomes a fine art, and virtue and honour and purity in woman is held up to ridicule. A lady who has married a man very much her senior, is represented as encouraging the advances of a seducer, who, when she throws herself in his arms, to avoid the expense of having to keep her, sends her back to her husband; and yet the man who forces this filth on the stage complains that he is badly treated, and questions whether the world has ever given birth, or ever will give birth, to any conception as obscene as that of the old man in “The Pink Dominoes” – a play which, it must be remembered, has had a most successful run upon the stage. At the theatre, the same writer observes, “I have beheld a young man hidden in a chest spring out upon a woman half dressed, while from her lips broke words I shudder to repeat. In peril I have watched with bated breath an attempt to commit a rape elaborately represented before the public. In ‘Madame! attend Monsieur,’ I have seen a woman take a shirt in one hand, and a shift in the other, and, standing in the very centre of the stage, walk up to the float, deliberately put the two together, then with a wild shriek, etc.;” and here the writer stops short. No one, of course, expects people will stop away from the theatre; but why cannot the tone of the place be a little higher, and the whole style of the amusement more worthy of a civilised community? Why cannot we have a less liberal display of legs and bosoms, and more generally in the matter of wit? There have always been admirers of good acting. Why should they be ignored, and the stage lowered to the level of the country bumpkin, the imbecile youth of the day, and his female friends?
III. – OUR MUSIC-HALLS
I fear the first impression made upon the mind of the careful observer is that, as regards amusements, the mass of the people are deteriorating very rapidly, that we are more frivolous and childish and silly in this way than our fathers. One has no right to expect anything very intellectual in the way of amusements. People seek them, and naturally, as a relief from hard work. A little amusement now and then is a necessity of our common humanity, whether rich or poor, high or low, sinner or saint; and of course, in the matter of amusements, we must allow people a considerable latitude according to temperament and age and education, and the circumstances in which they are placed. In these days no one advocates a Puritanical restraint and an abstinence from the pleasures of the world. We have a perfect right to everything that can lighten the burden of life, and can make the heart rejoice. It was not a pleasant sign of the times, however, when the people found an amusement in bull-baiting, cock-fighting, boxing, going to see a man hanged; nor is it a pleasant sign of the tunes when, night after night, tens of thousands of our fellow-countrymen are forced into shrieks of laughter by exhibitions as idiotic as they are indecent. A refined and educated people will seek amusements of a refining character. If the people, on the contrary, rejoice in the slang and filthy innuendoes, and low dancing and sensational gymnastics of the music-hall, what are we to think? The music-hall is quite an invention of modern days. In times not very remote working men were satisfied with going into a public-house – having there their quantum suff. of less adulterated beer than they can get now – and sometimes they got into good society at such places. For instance, we find Dr. Johnson himself a kind of chairman of an ale-house in Essex Street, Strand, where, for a small fee, you might walk up and see the Doctor as large as life and hear him talk. At a later day the bar-parlour, or whatever it might be called, of the public-house, was the place in which men gathered to talk politics, and to study how they could better themselves. When Bamford, the Lancashire Radical, came to town in 1817, the working men were principally to be found discussing politics in all the London public-houses. One such place he visited and describes: “On first opening the door,” he writes, “the place seemed dimmed by a suffocating vapour of tobacco curling from the cups of long pipes, and issuing from the mouths of the smokers in clouds of abominable odour, like nothing in the world more than one of the unclean fogs of the streets, though the latter were certainly less offensive and probably less hurtful. Every man would have his half-pint of porter before him; many would be speaking at once, and the hum and confusion would be such as gave an idea of there being more talkers than thinkers, more speakers than listeners. Presently, ‘order’ would be called, and comparative silence restored; a speaker, stranger, or citizen would be announced with much courtesy or compliment. ‘Hear, hear, hear,’ would follow, with clapping of hands and knocking of knuckles on the tables till the half-pints danced; then a speech with compliments to some brother orator or popular statesman; next a resolution in favour of Parliamentary reform, and a speech to second it; an amendment on some minor point would follow; a seconding of that; a breach of order by some individual of warm temperament, half-a-dozen would rise to set him right, a dozen to put them down; and the vociferation and gesticulation would become loud and confounding.” Such things are out of fashion nowadays. Political discussion requires a certain amount of intellectual capacity. In London there are but few discussion forums now, and the leading one is so fearfully ventilated and so heavily charged with the fumes of stale tobacco and beer, that it is only a few who care to attend. I remember when there were three very close together and well attended. I remember also when we had a music-hall in the City. It was not a particularly lively place of resort. We used to have “The Bay of Biscay” and “The Last Rose of Summer,” and now and then a comic song, while the visitor indulged in his chop or beef-steak and the usual amount of alcoholic fluid considered necessary on such occasions. But now we have changed all that, and the simple-hearted frequenter of Dr. Johnson’s Tavern half-a-century back would be not a little astonished with the modern music-hall, which differs in toto cælo from the public-house to which in old-fashioned days a plain concert-room was attached.
A glance at the modern music-hall will show us whether we have improved on our ancestors. In one respect you will observe it is the same. Primarily it is a place in which men and women are licensed to drink. The music is an after-thought, and if given is done with the view to keep the people longer in these places and to make them drink more. Externally the music-hall is generally a public-house. It may have a separate entrance, but it is a public-house all the same, and you will find that you can easily go from one to the other. In the music-hall itself the facilities for drink are on every side. There are generally two or three bars at which young ladies are retained to dispense whatever beverages may be required. In the stalls there are little tables on which the patrons of the establishment place their glasses of grog or beer. A boy comes round with cigars and programmes for sale. All the evening waiters walk up and down soliciting your orders. It is thus to the drink, and not to the payment made for admission, that the proprietor looks to recoup himself for his outlay – and that is considerable. A popular music-hall singer makes his forty pounds a week; not, however, by singing at one place all the week, but by rushing from one to the other, and the staff kept at any music-hall of any pretensions is considerable. Internally, the music-hall is arranged as a theatre – with its stage, orchestra, pit, galleries, and boxes.
“Don’t you think,” said the manager of one of the theatres most warmly patronised by the working classes, to a clerical friend of mine, “don’t you think I am doing good in keeping these people out of the public-houses all night?”
My clerical friend was compelled to yield a very reluctant assent. In the case of the music-hall nothing of the kind can be said in extenuation. It is only a larger and handsomer and more attractive kind of drinking shop. In one respect it may be said to have an advantage. Mostly of a night, about the bars of common public-houses and gin-palaces, there are many unfortunate women drinking either by themselves or with one another, or with their male companions. In the music-hall “the unfortunate female” element – except in the more central ones, where they swarm like wolves or eagles in search of their prey – is absent, or, at any rate, not perceptible. The workman takes there his wife and family, and the working man the young woman with whom he keeps company. There can be no harm in that? you say. I am not quite sure. Let me give one case as an illustration of many similar which have come under my own observation.
A girl one evening went with a friend, an omnibus conductor, to a music-hall. She was well plied with drink, which speedily took an effect on her brain, already affected by the gas and glare, and life and bustle of the place. The girl was a fine, giddy, thoughtless girl of the maid-of-all-work order. In the morning when she awoke she found herself in a strange room with her companion of the preceding night. What was the result? She dared not go back to her place. She was equally afraid to go home. I need not ask the reader to say what became of her. Let him question the unfortunate women who crowd the leading thoroughfares of a night how they came to be what they are. It is a fact, I believe, that no censorship is applied to music-hall performances, and that the only censorship is that of the audience. The audience, be it remembered, begins to drink directly the doors are opened, and remains drinking all the time till they are closed; and you may be sure that in a mob of two, or sometimes, as is the case, three thousand people, that the higher is the seasoning and the lower the wit, and the more abundant the double entendre, the greater is the applause, and the manager, who sits in an arm-chair at the back of the orchestra and in front of the audience, takes note of that. In the days of the Kembles, Mrs. Butler notes how the tendency of actors was not so much to act well as to make points and bring down the house. Especially does she deplore Braham’s singing as much to be censured in this respect, and as unworthy of his high powers and fame. In the music-hall this lower style of acting and singing becomes a necessity. The people go to be amused, and the actor must amuse them. If he can stand on his head and sing, immense would be the applause. If he is unequal to this, he must attempt something equally absurd, or he must have dogs and monkeys come to his aid; and perhaps after all he will find himself outrivalled by a Bounding Brother or a wonderful trapeze performer. If the music-hall proprietor in a northern city had prevailed on Peace’s mistress, Miss Thompson, to have appeared on his stage, what a fortune he would have made.
The other night I went into one of the largest of our music-halls, not a hundred miles away from what was once Rowland Hill’s Chapel. There must have been more than three thousand people present. Not a seat was to be had, and there was very little standing room. I paid a shilling for admission, and was quite surprised to see how entirely the shilling seats or standing places were filled with working men, many of whom had their wives and sweethearts with them. The majority, of course, of the audience was made up of young men, who, in the course of the evening spent at least another shilling in beer and “baccy.” In these bad times, when people, in the middle ranks of life are in despair at the hard prospect before them, here were these working men spending their two hundred pounds a night at the least at this music-hall.
When I managed to squeeze my way in it was about the hour of ten, when men who have to get up early to work ought to be in bed. The performances were in full swing, and the enthusiasm of the audience, sustained and stimulated by refreshment, was immense. A female or two were the worse for liquor, but otherwise by that time the intoxicating stage had not been gained. After some very uninteresting bicycling by riders in curious dress, a man disguised as a nigger sang a lot of low doggerel about his “gal.” In the course of his singing he stopped to tell us that his “gal” had a pimple and that he liked pimples, as they were signs of a healthy constitution. He then, amidst roars of laughter, pretended to catch a flea. He liked fleas, he said; a flea came in the daylight and looked you in the face like a man as it bit you; but a bug he hated. It crawled over your body in the dark and garroted you. Then he went on to speak in a mock-heroic style of the rights of women. He “spotted” some naughty ones present – an allusion received with laughter. He loved them all, male or female, married or single, and advised all the young men present to get married as soon as possible and then hang themselves. Ballet dancing of the usual character followed, and I came away.
It is said a paper recently sent a special correspondent to describe a London music-hall; the description was refused admission into the paper on the ground of indecency, and I can well believe it.
As to the profit made by the music-halls there can be no doubt. Take for instance the London Pavilion. I find the following newspaper paragraph: Sir Henry A. Hunt, C.B., the arbitrator in the case of the London Pavilion Music Hall, has sent in his award. M. Loibl claimed £147,000 for the freehold and goodwill, the building being required for the new street from Piccadilly to Oxford Street. The award is £109,300. The freehold cost M. Loibl £8,000, and his net profits in 1875 were £10,978; in 1876, £12,083; and in 1877, £14,189. Let me give another illustration. When the proprietor of Evans’ Supper Rooms was refused his license, his loss was estimated at £10,000 per annum. It surely evidently is more ready to pay liberally for the gratification of its senses, than for the promotion of its virtues.