The Home of Burlesque

ALMOST any one will tell you that the Gaiety is “a theatre to which nobody ever goes.” Nobody, that is, save the thousand low-browed men and boys who pack “the home of burlesque” to the roof twelve times a week. Never was nobody so multitudinous! Yet the mathematicians multiply zero indefinitely without increasing its value, and in a certain sense the Gaiety’s audience consists solely of zeros. In another sense, though, it consists of your disinherited fellow mortals, whom no man with a heart in his breast will despise and whom only the Pharisee will decline to consider. Happily, they are easily considered and as easily comprehended in this sordid play-house; for the theatre, of whatever rank or pattern, remains always a sort of father confessor, fathoming the minds and morals of its devotees. Indeed, who knows but we shall emerge from the disgraced portals with a kinder and gentler spirit toward them of low estate, and with the pardonable elation of such as have essayed to gather figs of thistles and come off not wholly unrewarded ?

You will find the Gaiety’s exterior quite ferociously deterrent — which shows you why “nobody,” a thousand strong, can’t resist its attractions. Blatant posters announce “The Forty Flirts,” describing them as “a bevy of bouncing, bewitching, bewildering blondes” and as “40 la belle Parisiennes 40,” whose performance is “positively the limit of sensation.” Ostensibly, the establishment tlrrives by virtue of its vices. Some vices it lias, and none deplores them more grievously than I; and yet the philosopher who enjoyed visiting the penitentiary “because it was so inspiring to see so many men living according to their convictions” would derive far nobler edification from a visit to the home of burlesque, which, by a species of hypocrisy the-other-end-to, makes shift to live even above its pretensions.

To take the posters at face value would be to argue yourself guilty of altogether blameworthy innocence. They are n’t there to do justice to the show, but rather to flatter patrons by proffering a graceful and enthusiastic tribute to what the Underworld conceives to be its taste.

Needless, then, or nearly so, the prophylactic steeling of the moral nature with which a student of low life first enters that whited lobby, joins the unwholesome queue before the ticket-window, and buys his seat, preferably one in a box, whence stage and audience — audience especially — may best be scanned. It’s a wondrously cheap seat, though the Gaiety’s costliest. And hereby hangs a paradox: with exquisite delicacy, the disreputable play-house conserves the selfrespect of the abandoned. A price that yields a seventh-class place in a firstclass theatre yields a first-class place in a seventh-class theatre; there you’re the tail of the kite, here the kite of the tail. Observe, too, how magnanimously the balcony welcomes its twenty-cent adherents, while for a dime and a headache any rogue may find an appropriate perch in the gallery.

Now for the entrance and an initial impression — alas, not a visual one! An extreme and very ancient sniffiness pervades the auditorium. But que voulezvous ? Pure indoor air costs money. So do clean floors. And soon the eye completes the testimony of the nostrils in proof that here an ultra-Stevensonian manager has sought to “earn a little and spend a little less.” What with dingy red walls untouched by brush since ’78, chairs rickety beyond belief, aisle-carpets all in rags and tatters, and proscenium pilasters still showing bruises where the clowns of a bygone epoch belabored them with one another’s persons, the house deserves canonization at the hands of any who call economy a virtue. Meanwhile it keeps an eye alert for small emoluments. A youth stalks to and fro, hissing, “Cigarss, gents? Cigarss?” The drop curtain (bedaubed with a masterpiece labeled “The Swanny River” and well-stocked with fitting water-fowl) has a border of paid advertisements.

Directed, rather than ushered, to your box, you seat yourself next to — well, let us say a sailor in uniform — and survey the arrived and arriving host. Before you, a sadly questionable array of artisans, cheap drummers, petty clerks, temporarily opulent malefactors, and, plainly discernible, certain daring souls from the rural glades. A nervous lot, these; valorous at the ticket-window, they afterward turn discreet, for they recall that custom permits humorists upon the stage to single out a front-seat enthusiast as target for highly personal and as highly unconventional sallies — such, for instance, as comment upon sparse-grown hair. A little farther back, a glummer and less decent company, though more at ease. Beyond them, a noticeably viler herd. In the balcony a blend of pickpocket, day-laborer, and unwashen ne’er-doweel. Thronging the topmost gallery — beneath a placard that proclaims, “No guying, whistling, or cat-calls: you are liable to be ejected” — a rabble of tramps, thugs, sots, jailbirds, and noxious urchins. The higher, the lower!

As regards demeanor, the humblest set the fashion. If heat annoys, men shed their coats. Always they smoke — wisely, considering the atrocious atmosphere, but none too well as touching choice of cigars. Should two gentlemen engage in personal combat, back yonder by the door, the entire multitude will rise as one man, turn their backs on the glittering soubrette, and await the issue. Sometimes, under extreme provocation, they indulge in audible dramatic criticism. It is recorded that once, when an usher saw fit to chide an incipient William Winter for so doing, the spectators manifested their indignation by righteously quitting the Gaiety in a body, thus vindicating the sovereignty of the individual.

But listen! There arises a gust, then a tempest of impatience. Whistling, stamping, and hand-clapping rage in gallery and balcony. Even the parquet folds its Hearst newspapers and joins in the uproar. This continues — minutes actually, hours seemingly — till at last there comes a glow beneath the curtain, followed by the solemn up-climbing of some five or six musicians (more there never are) from under the stage. With phenomenal promptness those artists attack a yellow overture; and the curtain, with many a jerk and hesitation, straggles aloft, revealing an inner one on which is painted a copy of the “Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus.” Fortunately, the overture soon spends its virulence, and up soars the Roman hippodrome, discovering the deck of a battleship, whereon the “40 la belle Parisiennes 40 ” — grievously decimated, since they number scarce more than twelve, yet effulgent in silks and jewels and blinding blonde tresses — are harmoniously disporting themselves in the guise of court ladies, dancing (not less decorously than in musical comedy), and screeching a sentimental ditty now serving its novitiate ere gracing the barrel-organ. Here beginneth the first “ boilesque ” — to endure full sixty minutes.

To fend off intellectual locomotor ataxia, as the jumping marvel proceeds, focus without delay upon this: whatever else burlesque may or may not be, assuredly it is n’t burlesque, while nevertheless it is. In the waning ’sixties, as Mr. Howells plaintively relates in his Suburban Sketches, there arrived from France a sensational and spectacular type of travesty upon legend or romance, followed by a still more ignoble type from England. Now the Gaiety’s offering, though bereft of satirical aim, devoid of plot, and guiltless of point or pertinence, has usurped the title of that elder genre in hope to inherit the obloquy with which it was rightly crowned. Were the modern burlesque altogether frank regarding its lineage, it would trace its descent, not from “La Belle Hélène” but from a revue at the Folies-Bergère, though even then there were room for Terry McManus’s retort to the genealogical braggart, “Begorrah, what a descint!” For, while declining to import the wit, the keenness, and the more than Satanic cleverness of the sketches that compose the revue, it has borrowed only what Matthew Arnold would have termed its architectonics. Problem: to deploy the chorus in seven different costumes within the hour. Modus: to assuage the audience with truck-horse humor (Puck and Judge dramatized) as interpreted by the traditional comic Irishman, German, Jew, cowboy, barnstormer, tramp, yokel, or fop, what time the ladies of the troupe are accomplishing their delightful metamorphoses. Such burlesque as survives is mainly a trick of rags and patches and grease-paint.

Done with shrieking and polkaing, our maids of honor skip blithely overboard, R. and L. — you listen for the splash! — reaching for buttons betwixt their shoulder-blades as they run. With extraordinary promptitude they reappear — there in the lee scuppers, next the functionary in shirtsleeves who shapes the destinies of lights and curtain — and presently, clad as pink-and-green geishas, invade the deck, again to sing and dance. Once more the plunge into the deep, whence they emerge, having suffered a change appropriate thereto, as new and strange Vassar undergraduates, whose deportment should certainly illumine the academic shades. And lo, here they come again, brave in gorgeous reds and yellows, clicking their Spanish castanets. They shall yet wear the guise of such Moorish beauties, fencing girls, and Pierrots as naturally abound aboard a man-of-war.

To be sure, there’s her ladyship the Admiral, who twitters the familiar oceanic chanty, “When Father laid the Carpet on the Stairs;” and there stalk certain lesser mariners, likewise recruited from the “ bevy of bouncing, bewitching, bewildering blondes; ” but these have an alien air, as if too close akin to reality to be real. More felicitous, you’ll agree, are the antics of the “Sunday supplement” worthies who rule the decks while the chorus are off stage revising their raiment, and who keep the company’s “properties” quite violently in motion. Nobody knows what would become of burlesque if it were n’t for properties. That enormous hawser, for instance, yields twelve huge guffaws a week; an ultra-simian Irishman tugs and tugs at it with might and main till at last appears at its other end the tiniest and most anticlimactic of spider-dogs. That siphon bottle raises tumult and rejoicings by treating the Jew to a more than baphometic seltzer baptism. Those stuffed clubs, slap-sticks, and inflated bladders become positively edifying when they knock down the Irvingesque barnstormer, whose every fall gets emphasis from cymbal and drum. That infinitesimal Teddy bear, brought on by a proud huntsman after the firing of a gun, is almost as subtly humorous as the property turkey, which, having figured upon a comic banquet table, gets hurled at the pianist’s head. No doubt the musician deserves the onslaught. I once perused an effusion in which such an one descanted upon the merits of his guild. It began: “There are pianists and pianists. In this article, reference is had to the latter only.”

But look! The entire company rushes in upon the stage, so attired as to leave no phase of the preceding helter-skelter without its representatives, prancing and shrieking; and now the curtain falls — not in the cruel perpendicular affected by those of less humble theatres, but zig-zag fashion and with many failings of the heart, as if loath to veil so lovely a spectacle from a joyous and uproariously appreciative audience. Here endeth the first “boilesque.”

It leaves you quite lost in admiration — not of the performers, since they were plainly recovered from the very scrapheap of the profession; not of their music, equaled only by the raging of a country choir; and certainly not of their prehistoric monkey-shines and their jokes of primitive lucidity; no, what you have all along contemplated with reverent awe was the intellect that created this delirious and fascinating production, till you burned to cry, “Author! author! ” When I asked Mr. Wieland, the eminent juggler, how it was possible for a human being to write a burlesque, he gravely replied, “Well, just look at the things Edison and Tesla invent!” He by no means underestimated the feat. Should any reader of these pages aspire to try his skill at the art, I counsel him not to go about it without due precaution. Having first equipped himself with miscellaneous fragments of light opera libretti, colored supplements, comic valentines, and the works of Eli Perkins, let him tastefully combine them while looping the loop. Naturally, the best results cannot be expected unless the author has derived a few preliminary suggestions from some accomplished inebriate.

A production thus achieved will merit a modest share in the plea so often advanced for the stage, namely, that it mirrors life. For burlesque reflects, with pitiless accuracy, the mental life of its audience. It was once said of a popular but incompetent bishop that “his foolishness fitted their foolishness; ” here it is even so. Incapable of sustained attention, assertive memory, logical inference, or that range of consciousness which groups many incidents into a harmonious whole, so that events shall flow river-like to a fated destination, they abhor the drama and adore burlesque — for its very faults’ sake. And this, I find, should teach us a tender, compassionate charity for their own so grievous faults, since, as morality is nine-parts brains, these disordered mentalities can’t be held to account like cultured folk for their shortcomings. They live by minutes, not by years. Their thoughts come out in spots, not in streaks. They miss the connection between conduct and consequence. In their philosophy, human life is as rampant a riot as the wildest of burlesques — chaotic, without reason, guided or misguided by blind fatality. Not the hardest or most reiterant of hard knocks will convince them of the contrary, for they lack the grasp of sequence. Crime, detection, arrest, trial, conviction, incarceration — an obvious series to us, a recondite and incomprehensible to them! They’re “no a’ there.”

So it comes about that the Gaiety argues twice each day for the criminology of Lombroso and Ellis, the penology of Brockway and Scott; and if the great reformatories lacked other sanction, this home of burlesque would load them with sufficient honor. For, unlike the oldfashioned prisons, they treat the sinner not as a man plus criminality, but as a man minus the wit to keep straight; instead of trying to pound something out of him, they try to pound something in. And the something is a conception of what the theologians call the moral order of the universe. They introduce system among mental possessions hitherto chaotic. They do so by propounding a single central theme for the sinner’s intramural meditations — the lofty and beautiful theme of human liberty!

The convict’s one aspiration is to get out. Very well, let him earn his way out. Mark him daily (and justly) and let good marks hasten his release, bad ones delay it. Appeal also to more immediate desires. Show him that work squarely done, lessons well learned, and rules faithfully kept ameliorate his circumstances, giving him honor stripes on his sleeves, a modicum of freedom, a softer bed, and decenter food. Show him that recalcitrancy means a scarlet suit, no freedom at all, and the toughest bed and board obtainable. Thus, for a considerable period, you force him to think normally. You make his every hour a dramatization of ethics. If you teach him to cope with the reformatory and literally to “win out,” you teach him how respectable folk cope with the world. He “gets the hang of it.”

After the opening burlesque, the “olio.” The origin of its name, say some, is as lost to philology as is that of Mistral’s Mireille to Provençal folk-lore; others trace it to a Spanish word, meaning a food compounded of many ingredients; but the thing itself amounts simply to a form of entertainment filched from the London music halls.

The joint perpetrators of the “burletta” now appear seriatim — singly, or by twos and threes — and thereby expose themselves to separate indictments. Not that the management so intends; it aims solely to squeeze the maximum of amusement-making out of a minimum of “talent.” The same passion for economy that cuts traveling expenses by transforming “The Forty Flirts” into “The Rollicking Rippers ” after a week at the Gaiety, and advertising them as a wholly different company at the Star, only to present them the week following at the Bowen Casino as “The Bowery Beauties,” inspires that little carnival of unrefined vaudeville, the olio.

Happily, it is n’t difficult to construct a fairly representative olio, since there’s nothing so uniform as these varieties. It begins, let us say, with a singing and dancing and joking turn (pronounced “toin”) by McGilligan and McGooligan, from winch you learn why “refined ” vaudeville is honored with so patrician an epithet. McGilligan — he of the statesmanlike silk hat, frock-coat, gray trousers, and scarlet waistcoat, an ensemble well suiting his rubicund countenance and merry side-whiskers — might, to be sure, meet tolerance among the knowing. Not so McGooligan. What with crimson face, whited upper lip, green Galway whiskers, a tiny mirror adhering to the end of his nose and scintillating as he moves; what with an alarm clock doing duty as a shirt stud, a cabbage as boutonnière, and a shillalah stout enough for a newel post, there’s not an inch of him, from infinitesimal stovepipe to fantastically elongated feet, but screams with absurdity — plaided coat seven sizes too big, trousers cut from a horse-blanket, waistcoat an Irish flag. Indeed, he is so terrifically funny that you gaze upon him with mute solemnity. The audience, however, roars loud and long. There’s philosophy in this. Humor, like all refinements, connotes a sense of fitness, of balance, of just relations. A slight disarrangement amuses you, as when the prayer-book finds accidental lodgment upon the cellaret; but you do not chuckle at the moving van and its mass of jumbled contents ; neither do its horses; and the Gaiety’s adherents, by laughing at McGooligan’s make-up, betray a clearly sub-equine jocosity. They want all creation turned upside down, wrong-side out, hind-side before, and even torn to bits and stuck together as irrationally as possible. It was Goethe, if I remember, who said that men never displayed their characters more clearly than by what they thought laughable; they likewise display their brains, or lack of them; wherefore I think myself doubly warranted in declaring that anybody capable of enjoying McGooligan’s comicality should be clapped into a reformatory without trial, simply as a precaution against treasons, wars, and stratagems — a proposal abundantly justified when the “team ” begin to sing, or should I not more properly say, to bray ? morally, mentally, and industrially — and you would reinstate the heroic age when he of stoutest brawn became chieftain of his tribe. Once, when Mr. John L. Sullivan appeared at the Gaiety, and sparred (innocuously, I assure you) with a hired brave from around the corner, the spectators experienced the thrills of contact with greatness. “Speech! Speech!” they cried, and the man of might spake thus: “I’ve boxed all the best men in the world, and I’m ready to do it again.” The entire audience bellowed assent. All the best men — ah, yes! Our ancestors held an analogous creed, from which sprang that ornament of modern civilization, the British Peerage. Adieu, pink vision, welcome, ye sturdy acrobats — two in sky-blue tights, the third a white-clad clown with whited face! Quite superb is their show of masculine strength and skill, enlivened with delightful pantomimic humor, and right generous their reward. For the Underworld worships muscle; Whitmanesque, to that extent, in its philosophy, it has never achieved that divorce betwixt flesh and spirit which is our Puritan heritage and which the cult of athleticism has only partially healed. Muscle, it perceives, wins both bread and honor, serving not only for toil, but also for the adjustment of intellectual differences. Reduce the whole race to the Underworld’s level —

But think a moment! Have n’t you somewhere seen yonder acrobats before ? Why, yes, to be sure — in refined “vawdavil! ” There’s a perpetual interchange between the loftiest and lowliest ranks of the varieties, vulgar talent taking “refined” engagements whenever chance offers, and “refined” talent taking vulgar in days of adversity. In summer the bulk of our Gaiety people “play parks.”

Occasionally, as you shall now perceive, the olio gains recruits from light opera. Time robs the prima donna’s voice of its once so golden magic, and time hints darkly at the warning — printed by way of advertisement in L' Illustration— “Prenez garde, madame, vous commencez a grossir! ” Alas for our poor Madame! Once regnant, as Dorothy, once triumphant, as Nanon, she stoops at last to delight this sordid rabble in “songs wid pitchers.” Her voice recites the tragedy of camp and battlefield, crudely portrayed on stereopticon slides; it also recites her own. Note the covered tones — a false technique yielding adorable music in youth but certain ere long to work its havoc — which explain her wretched plight; note also the exquisite enunciation and here and there the vibrant, ringing note — survivals of her glory. The audience, however, forgives her ruined middle register, and applauds both her gown and her “pitchers.” What more noble than crimson and spangles if not those soldiers, there upon the screen ? A thousand hearts leap up in gallant response. There’s neither man nor boy in that throng but would gladly turn trooper forthwith, and suffer and die for our cause, the cause that is always right! And whatever the inherent villainy of the battle-thirst, as here exemplified, it becomes a wonderful convenience when volunteers are wanted; you can get more enlistments out of the Gaiety in five minutes than out of a patrician playhouse in a thousand and one nights.

And so Madame bows herself away amid general enthusiasm, for the pathos of her professional catastrophe has n’t found the hearts of that uproarious multitude. It takes brains to feel —rather to see what to feel. Accordingly, when a Hebrew impersonator, himself a Hebrew, next glides before the curtain and for fifteen minutes lampoons his own race, huge merriment results. Forgive these foolish fellows: they know not what they do. To you, the shiny frock coat represents the trailing gabardine, familiar in European ghettos; the hat, crammed down over the ears, recalls the Jewish cap; the diamonds, flashing with every gesture, tell of oriental ostentation and also of the days when the martyr nation invested its wealth in gems because they could easily be caught up and carried away in the hour of peril; the close-cropped beard suggests the flowing ornament so grand in Waltner’s etchings; the loathly pallor of the face and the melancholy hollowness of eye bespeak ages on ages of hunger; and you know that the Jewish nose, here exaggerated almost beyond credence, belongs to but one of the countless types of a race incomparable for genius, fortitude, and solidarity despite all the woes and calamities of the Diaspora. These things you see and comprehend. The audience does n’t, any more than it perceives the shame of an Israelite’s scandalizing Israel for hire. It derives from the sorry spectacle a single impression: its Jewish neighbors are being shown up as ridiculous and outlandish. Mind you, there’s no trace of Anti-Semitism here. It’s sufficiently genial laughter. At bottom, I suspect, it rests upon the reasonable conviction that whoever seeks asylum among us — whether Hebrew or Celt or Saxon or Latin — owes us the tribute of conformity to American standards. val; she is “doing thirteen minutes.” Again she sings, this time an old, old song, of undying popularity, with the refrain (here reproduced in the phrasing her technique requires): — The song ended, our pink satin vision withdraws, and almost instantly reappears. Encores, at the Gaiety, are n’t gratuitous, they are compulsory; the angelic young woman has given bonds to “hold” the audience for a stated inter-

He — never cares-to wander from-his Own — fire—side,

He — never cares-to wander or-to roam, For-with baby on-his knee He ’s-as happy as-can be,

And — there’s no place-like home — sweet — home!

As poor, hopeless outcasts clap their hands, — they who have never dandled babe on knee and know no home save the lodging-house, nor ever will; they who so dearly love, or seem to love, the cyncial jibes at all that makes the fireside our earthly paradise, — as those sad wretches thus bare their hearts, you find yourself not surprised, and fall to marveling less at them than at the singer. That voice of hers-what muse shall inspire the description thereof ? Think of the trolley conductor, of the newsboy, of the graphophone, think of all three blent hideously together, and then quote Charles Dudley Warner and exclaim, “To sum it all up in one word, it is something for which there is no name!” As for her art—so frantic in its emphasis upon tempo, so exaggerated in its bizarre staccato, so yellow in its stridency — at the very thought of it a musician would cut his throat, blow out his brains, and leap from a tenth-story window.

Presently, as is not unnatural, you inquire whence came her melodies. They bear to one another a pronounced family resemblance, and thereby hangs psychology. The late Jere O’Halloran, who wielded the razor by day and the lyre by night, used often to assure me that not for worlds would he allow his verses to be set to other airs than parodies upon those already popular.

Nor was he alone in his philosophy. Note the successive transcripts of a single air: “On Calvary’s Brow,” made known to the masses by the Salvationists’ cornet, is transformed into “Say Au Revoir,” which in turn becomes “Take Back Your Gold,” and eventually “Strike up the Band.” This is n’t a mere expression of fondness for the familiar, as when our elders prefer the melodies of bygone days; here, precisely as when you observed the incongruities of the burlesque, you have to do with intellectual deficiencies; it takes attention, memory, and the faculty of grouping impressions to “understand” a new tune. For a proletarian audience, even an old one has to be sung in the shortest of phrases, or semiphrases, and the pauses say, as to a green stenographer, “Got that?”

Perchance, as the pink apparition begins her third and last musical homily,— a eulogy of plighted troth and brave fidelity,—you fall to querying what manner of soul she may be. The answer is probably sorrowful enough; and yet, for your consolation, you must know that, a mile or so from the Gaiety, there exists a boarding-house that serves as a hospice for such performers in low vaudeville as would flee the tainted environment of their calling. Actually — there’s a family Bible on the table in the parlor, and the proprietor is a local luminary of the Epworth League. Many a participant in the least defensible procedures of the “home of burlesque” despises such vulgarity, tolerating it simply as “all in the day’s work.” applause! It’s only at the Gaiety that tramp and prison-bird see beauty thus arrayed (so accurately impersonating the “heiress ” of Hearst journalism); besides, the rudest of our fellows have reverence for womanhood, here seeming a bright compendium of all the virtues. And when her song relates how a high-born lady, having lost her own wee daughter, adopted a poor, neglected, unloved little girl and showered benefactions upon her, lo! the vision in pink turns preacher; virtue passive becomes virtue active; and a thousand hearts leap up in chivalrous sympathy. It might have been years, instead of seconds, since this very audience was wallowing in vulgarity. The sorry twain make exit, the lights pop down, the orchestra strikes up a popular melody, and — within a tremulous, rainbow-bordered disc of calcium-glare — forth steps a girl in a pink satin balldress. White-armed, white-shouldered, fair-haired, rose-garlanded, she looks the incarnation of sweetness, gentleness, and youthful innocence. Instantly the wildest

However abrupt the metamorphosis, you may count it genuine; so indeed you might in a far more startling case. The Gaiety once proffered a spectacle which, had it not had its counterpart in certain aristocratic playhouses, would have cried aloud for the constable; yet directly it was followed by the canticle “Jerusalem,” illustrated with tinted magic-lantern slides, — angels, and pearly gates, and the gleaming courts of Heaven, — to the unutterable joy of a multitude that had just plumbed the depths of the moral Inferno. You might have imagined that the management intended to please two elements in a mixed throng; instead it intended to please two elements in a mixed individual. And both can even be pleased at one and the same time, as when a tableau vivant — reproducing the familiar lithograph, “Rock of Ages” — made it appropriate for four chorusgirls in pink tights to sing the hymn, thus blending the religious with the bacchanalian, much as was customary among the ancients. Its grotesque repulsiveness was wholly lost upon an audience whose brains were built in air-tight compartments. In fact you might call that audience more nearly Chinese than Greek; for a single Chinaman will comfortably assimilate Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity — not successively, but all three at once. If theological syncretism, why not moral syncretism ? However, it presupposes a lack of logic and a vast capacity for not generalizing — gifts with which the Gaiety is richly endowed and which prepare it for numberless anomalies, despite its intention to be frank and whole-hearted and to exemplify the virtue which Mr. Chuck Connors — ethical adviser and arbiter of taste to the Bowery

— has denominated “de real t’ing.”

Hence the ascendency of Hearst and

Hearstism. Hence also, with a difference, that of General Booth and his Salvation Army. Mr. Hearst, like the Gaiety’s proprietor, has fathomed the mysteries of Underworld psychology. He knows he can preach abomination in one column, holiness in the next; damn to-day what yesterday he praised; give himself the lie

— habitually and as a beverage — and never get caught at it. The “deadly parallel ” scares him not. His readers have n’t the scope of consciousness necessary to the appreciation of a self-contradiction. Meanwhile General Booth has found how easily the social derelict will step from the gin-shop door to the openair service, how naturally he will respond to moral appeal, and how genuine is his desire to do right. Nor is this all. With equal shrewdness the Salvationist has diagnosed the fellow’s weakness and perceived that his environment tempts to evil a thousand times where it tempts to good only once. That is why he garbs him in a conspicuous uniform, to armor him against the world. That is why he subjects him to iron discipline. That is why he strengthens his new-found faith by exposing it to ridicule and persecution. And he comprehends that dull intellects and feeble wills require the stimulus of sensationalism — just as Mr. Hearst comprehends it, and the manager of the Gaiety.

For harshness and brutal, ear-splitting, raucous ferocity, their voices are without parallel outside the home of burlesque, and the Underworld adores them. Whatever the other ills that assail low-born humanity, it enjoys a most enviable exemption from “nerves,” possessing a sensory system quite proof against shock — as the new anthropology has clearly demonstrated. Facing hunger, cold, fatigue, and bodily hurts, — and feeling them far less than we should, — the “submerged” are now, with equal impunity, facing the music.

Also they face a fusillade of jokes, known in the profession as “dat quick, snappy stuff” — jokes venerable, jokes vapid, and, though I grieve to report it, jokes all too broad! The immortality of the chestnut gets here its finest realization, till you wonder whence come those resounding peals of merriment. From wretches lately let loose after long imprisonment ? From seamen returned from interminable voyages ? From small boys, to whom every form of joke is still new ? More probably, I fancy, from victims of faithless memory and from such as, having heard the jibe a thousand times, have at last espied its point.

As for the vapid joke, sheer silliness, you attribute its success to that common calamity of proletarianism, arrested development, and find yourself confronted by a still unsolved problem of child study. Meanwhile puns, even clever ones, frequently fall flat. By no means is the pun the lowest form of wit; it presupposes two concepts leaping forth at once and battling for supremacy; and a low audience, like ours at the Gaiety, has rarely the wealth of ideation to afford more than one concept at a time. But whenever a pun has a taint of viciousness, be sure these knaves will acclaim it.

Let’s be fair, though. We pardon the coarseness of Shakespeare, telling ourselves that it merely reflects the morals of his time, and that it was intended for a Shakespearean audience. I invite a like charity for McGilligan and McGooligan, whose errors of taste are in no wise worse than the daily conversation of those who applaud them. Have we not here a modern counterpart of the churls who pitched carrots at the lords and ladies when strolling players performed in the courtyards of English inns three centuries ago ? If lords and ladies have left off welcoming broad jests, our churls deserve credit for having left off pitching carrots. Moreover, were the whole truth known, it would appear that this pair of bad comedians proffered soiled jokes less for love of them than because their more praiseworthy offerings so little deserved praise. They sinned that they might live. And their admirers responded with a sort of auto-calcitrant laughter, conscious of its guilt. It saved its whole-hearted enthusiasm for a very different species of art.

Long ere Mr. Levinsky has ceased flaying the Chosen People, great activity is heard to be in progress behind the curtain, — yes, and seen to be. For the curtain scarcely ever quite touches the stage. Through the gap it leaves, you catch glimpses of many high-heeled slippers — some yellow, some blue, some a blazing scarlet — tripping to and fro or standing at rest. A second burlesque impends.

For which of our sins ? Even were we accused of murder with malice aforethought, the law would refrain from twice jeopardizing the life of the body; why, then, should the Gaiety twice jeopardize that of the intellect ? Well, as little children say, because; also and more particularly because the pinnacle of dramatic art, as conceived by the “40 la belle Parisiennes 40,” has not yet been attained. In other words, the costumes bewailed by Mr. Howells in the late sixties and since hallowed by adoption in theatres wherever opera bouffe holds sway, have been saved up against the exigencies of a grand finale.

I don’t defend them. Indeed, I question how a civilization that makes the position of woman the touchstone of its excellence finds pardon for thus degrading her. A further paradox: whereas sometimes “our ” amusement houses — very virtuous, are they not ? — permit two hours or so of such parade, the ostentatiously wicked low theatre permits rather less than a fifth as much. Nevertheless, the Gaiety assumes, and so do its patrons, that the indignity affords supreme delight. Does it, really ? Remember the applause when the girl in the pink ball dress made entry; here she stands, in her coryphée garb, and now no one applauds. Some even go out — too little fascinated to remain.

The second burlesque differs from the first not merely by lasting but half an hour, by involving less singing (since every voice has grown hoarse), by diverging more pronouncedly from the paths of rectitude (as all decent resources have been exhausted), and by surpassing its precursor both in gorgeousness and violence, but also by betraying symptoms of plot. A mechanical staircase, let us say, leads up from a hotel lobby. As the melodramatic moment arrives — that is once in every three minutes — the steps fold down like the shutters of a window blind, and the cow-puncher, Jew, or comic Irishman, having all but reached the top, is sensationally precipitated. If that is n’t a plot, I’d like to know what is! And observe: plot connotes system. Any alienist will tell you that the lunatic whose ideas are systematized never recovers, whereas the lunatic whose ideas have no coherency at all may possibly get well. Consequently, though you sat out the opening burlesque without a tremor, you now keep feeling for your wits.

Happily, a measure of chaos alleviates an otherwise most alarming situation. Though some five or six of the Forty Flirts impersonate characters (or, more precisely, don’t), the rest come and go as gondoliers, amazons, football players, or soldier boys, whose antics have little enough relation to hotel life even as depicted in the Sunday newspapers and popular fiction. Equally beneficent, from the viewpoint of mental hygiene, is the blithely irrelevant clowning of menfolks between adventures upon the staircase.

But ere the burlesque attains its end, expect an æsthetic triumph, in this instance a dance that becomes a perfect riot of soft-tinted fabrics — costly ones, too. Think not that great dames shed their glories still undimmed without some profit (through the mediation of the old-clothes man) to their less favored sisters. And only see what joy the spectators derive therefrom! Endowed with a rare numbness of nose and an astounding toughness of ear, they have nevertheless a keen sensitiveness of eye. Still, the present pageant leaves much to be desired, principally stage management. Feet have been instructed, partly, but not hands or heads or expression of face. “Florodora,” you know, was n’t merely an affair of slippers; it was also, and especially, an affair of nods and becks and wreathed smiles; you realize for the first time how fine a product is that art which may not improperly be called the Higher Dancing. You observe, too, how imperfectly the management appreciates its audience. Can it fancy that they enjoy seeing lovely colors flooded with crimson or green or orange by the gas-man up aloft? Really, the supreme achievement of the Gaiety arrives when some imitator of Miss Loie Fuller defies control and lifts the beholder into a seventh heaven of æsthetic exaltation.

Now approaches the beginning of the end — the entire company massed upon the stage, prancing and jumping; the orchestra going it like angry demons, all but smashing their instruments; wreaths of paper flowers held high; and portraits of Mr. Grover Cleveland, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt impartially and unanimously applauded, till finally the stars and stripes are borne proudly in by the Jewish impersonator, and the Forty Flirts join in the noble anthem, “Keep your Eye on the Grand Old Rag! ” A fever of patriotic devotion, love of country run mad. The spectators, having broken all the nation’s laws, would gladly die for her. And at this juncture the curtain falls.

Oh, but the air tastes sweet as you burst from that noxious, over-heated, smoke-befouled atmosphere! Sweeter still is the sense of escape from out the realm of riot and unreason. How delicious the sunshine, if this has been a “mati-knee”! how calm and sane and pure the stars if an evening performance! Almost you exclaim, by a sort of moral and spiritual rebound,

And truly, much more is right and much more is good than you had fancied — especially in the Gaiety and its deplorable adherents. Pity — no mere sentimental pity, either — replaces censorious contempt; or, rather, shifts the censure to society at large, which has only the rogues it deserves.

As you turn your steps homeward, you find yourself philosophizing, not unamiably, upon all you have seen and heard. You conclude that the home of burlesque claims at least the merit of purveying enjoyment to the most unhappy of your fellow creatures, while inculcating certain virtues commonly recognized as Christian. Beyond question, it fosters hope. Next week a new array of mendacious posters will lure the same silly fellows back to the same silly booby-trap with fresh promises of “positively the limit of sensation;” they never are, but always to be, blessed! Also it fosters temperance and honesty; temperance because, since the Gaiety does n’t sell drinks (though some burlesque houses do), it becomes a citadel of refuge for inebriates, who can’t go out between the acts, as no entr’-actes are provided; of honesty because it pens up a herd of sneak-thieves and pickpockets for two hours and a half at a stretch. Moreover, it elevates industry and even prevents loss of life. What, think you, would happen to the trades, were those clowns and men-singers allowed a hand in them ? What to the art of cookery, were the “40 La Belle Parisiennes 40 ” restored to the kitchen ? What chimney would keep from tumbling about our ears, or what dinner fail to serve a death-warrant? But I sometimes suspect the institution affords more profit to the world outside it than to the world within. It enables the belligerently ethical to dog it with hired detectives (whereby they obtain much growth in grace), and it grants the sociological prowler a most fruitful opportunity for eavesdropping at the Underworld’s confessional.