Boys and the Theatre

ANY one at all familiar with boys at the present time, and with their interests and their amusements, cannot help being struck by their familiarity with the theatre. In the life of the city-bred boy of to-day, the stage occupies a very large place; indeed it is often his most absorbing interest. So universal is this condition that not to know the songs of the latest ‘musical show,’not to have seen the last catchy piece played at any of the leading theatres, puts a boy at once out of touch with his fellows. Hence the insistence with which many a boy pleads with his astonished parents to be allowed to go to this or that performance. His parents would not be so astonished if they could hear the talk of any group of school-boys from a city day-school or of boarding-school boys just back at work after a vacation. The stage is the staple subject of conversation, and the boy who has n’t seen the shows is as much out of it as a man is out of it at St. Andrews if he can’t talk golf.

Many parents of boys from fourteen to eighteen find themselves allowing much greater liberty to their sons than they themselves were ever allowed at the same age in the matter of the theatre, simply because the custom has become so universal: it is easier to allow your boy to do what ‘all the other boys do,’ than it is to consider seriously the real bearing of the matter and do what the boy’s own good requires. It is to such parents that this article is addressed, in the hope that they will find in it matter to strengthen their convictions and a sufficient argument to make them stand firm against this growing custom of allowing boys almost indiscriminate freedom in attending the theatre.

Certain of the evils which result from much theatre-going are so obvious that they call for no more than cursory mention here. It is a selfevident truth, for example, that growing boys need more sleep than their elders, and that frequent theatregoing is bad for their health. It is equally obvious that at this formative period in a boy’s life his taste is being moulded and determined just as surely as his mind and character, and that to let him go to any but a few selected plays results in equipping him for life with a taste which must inevitably be indiscriminating, if not positively demoralized. A still more serious, though perhaps not quite so obvious, result of the atmosphere of the stage is the craving to which it caters for complicated and artificial amusements. It is a crying evil of our modern life that simple pleasures are so rare. The ramble through the fields and woods, ending with a picnic luncheon, which used to delight their parents, no longer satisfies our children; one must tear through the country by motor-car and lunch at some far-away inn. The evening around the fireside, with reading or story-telling or ‘round’ games, has given place to dancing or an entertainment provided by a hired performer; and the taste for the theatre is but another example of this unhealthy appetite for artificiality and excitement. It is not, however, the purpose of this article to develop these phases of the matter. Our boys’ health, their taste, and their manner of life, are all of secondary importance to their morals.

There are some of us who believe that the question in the marriage service, ‘Wilt thou keep thee only unto her so long as ye both shall live?’ has its application long before a man comes with his bride to the church to make there his vows before the altar. The ideal of keeping himself unspotted and unsullied, for the sake of playing fair with the unknown woman whom he will some day marry, is often the strongest incentive that a young man can have to keep himself clear of demoralizing influences and to lead a decent, clean life. We all of us desire more than all else that our sons may have this ideal, but do we always remember that it will not grow of itself, and that its very life depends on the atmosphere in which a boy lives, and on the public opinion which feeds and nourishes it? Are we not apt to forget that such an ideal has not yet won a recognized place in the world, but that it is rather to-day a vision which has still to be accepted as a moral principle by humanity in general? Truth, justice, temperance, courage, loving service, are pretty much the same all the world over, and are everywhere recognized as among the virtues; but there is hardly a nation from Japan to England that recognizes continence as a virtue; only here in the United States will you meet any sort of universal sympathy with this ideal, or even any general understanding of it. We must jealously guard against every influence that tends to weaken it if we are to preserve it in our sons as a living vital force in their lives, and we must recognize that they are surrounded by a multitude of such influences; and of all this multitude, indiscriminate theatregoing is the most dangerous and the most subtle.

The truth of this statement is perhaps not very commonly realized. Nine people out of ten would probably say that bad books were much more dangerous to boys than bad plays; and so we find that, as a rule, parents are more particular about what a boy reads than about the shows that he sees acted. An examination of the facts, however, will be enough to show that for several reasons the effect of a play, good or bad, upon a boy’s mind is more penetrating, more comprehensive, and more lasting, than the effect of a book. This is because the book appeals only to the boy’s imagination. What he reads can only be made real to him by mental pictures, which will vary in intensity with the ability of the author and with the vividness of the imagery supplied by the boy’s own mind. His only means of keeping in his memory what he sees on the printed page is the power of his vision, physical and mental. The play, on the other hand, appeals to the ear as well as to the eye, and it leaves nothing to the imagination. What the boy sees is a fragment of real life, where the people involved are not creatures of his fancy but real living, breathing men and women. What they say, for better or worse, is printed on his memory, not in the dead symbols of letters, but in words and actions instinct with vital, moving force. Eye and ear and the actor’s art combine to sear the experience into his soul till it is almost as if he himself had lived it.

To understand what is put before him and to make it real, the boy’s imagination is not once called into play, but this does not mean that his imagination is necessarily idle. Suppose that the play is filled with vulgar innuendo, with speeches bordering on the indecent, and suppose that the chorus queens are openly flirting with men in the audience and exhibiting their personal charms in the way which the press-agent calls ‘dashing,’ but which decent people call disgusting. Do you suppose that the boy does n’t perceive these things, and that they do not excite him, and that his imagination does n’t work over-time? To paraphrase Kipling —

or to use Johnny’s own language, ‘There’s very little that gets by him.’ Yes, his imagination is very busy, and it leads him beyond the stage that lies immediately under his eyes. He hears live men and women saying impossible things, and he asks himself what kind of people they must be off the stage, what sort of things they say to each other in private at rehearsals, if they can say things as broad as this in public. He follows in his mind the acquaintance between the peach in the chorus and the chappie in the second row, which he imagines he sees beginning under his very eyes, never guessing that the flirtation is probably as much a part of the girl’s acting as her dancing is. We who are older take these things less seriously; we have become accustomed to them, therefore blind to them, as we are blind to the misery that we pass unheeded on the city streets, the horrors of the billboards along our railways, or the unsightly dump-heaps in our suburbs; but our boys see and note them all.

This does not mean that our boys are bad; it means that they are boys, young animals filled with animal life and animal instincts, facing a strange and fascinating world about which they are intensely curious. A certain side of this world they know only through hearsay, hearsay of a strange, furtive, sneaking, underground kind, but of a kind which no boy can escape. It is not possible, in an article devoted to play-going for boys, to dwell on the matter of the duty of parents to give their boys a sound, wholesome knowledge of the shadows of life as well as of its brighter aspects; but the duty is there, the duty of giving a boy a pureminded knowledge of life, instead of leaving this knowledge to come to him by chance. Parents neglect this duty, and the vast majority of boys have no clearer, juster knowledge of life than what they have been able to get from these underground channels; they cannot fail to be excited by the apparent justification of their information afforded by vulgar shows, since these shows are actually the only publicly tolerated demonstrations which immorality is allowed to make in our world of to-day, — so far, certainly, as our boys see the world.

Ever since the Elizabethan period the theatre has been the agent and the ally of vice. It will not do to cry out that a good play is as great an influence for good as a good sermon, or to name the noble and the pure men and women who have from time to time honored the profession of acting with their presence in it. No one wants boys to be kept away from uplifting plays, and no one is trying to throw mud at the actor’s art or the men and women of blameless life who make it their profession. The warning is directed against the unworthy plays, and against those who make use of the stage as a medium of advertising and publicity for immorality. It is a notorious fact that to-day, as in the past, the stage has lent itself to such purposes; and our boys cannot escape the demoralizing influence of the mere knowledge of this fact if they go much, and without guidance, to the theatre.

Three kinds of plays are dangerous to boys: the ‘problem play,’the salacious farce, and the ‘musical show.' Of these, the first is the least dangerous; the last, the most. The ' problem play’ is not apt at any rate to treat infidelity as amusing, but is apt to paint it in its true light, and to give us at least a glimpse of its harrowing consequences. The salacious farce, of course, is as demoralizing as anything can be, but we are on our guard against it. The danger is that it does not always carry its character written in its title, and that we may allow our children to attend it without ascertaining beforehand what it is really like. Such a play was recently described as follows in a Boston paper in the column devoted to plays then being given at the New York theatres: ‘French farce à l’Américaine — with its sprightliness thickened into dullness, its glitter coated with commonness, and its wit coarsened into vulgar innuendo. Already seen and liked in Boston.’ Of course, if we knew in advance that it was coarse and suggestive, we should be forewarned, but the trouble is that we depend on the judgment of a friend. ‘Oh, it’s a great show,’says he; ‘have n’t enjoyed anything so much for years. I laughed till my sides ached. Cleverly acted, too. You ought to see it.’ He is n’t thinking of its effect on a boy; the morals or lack of morals of the piece made no impression on him; he is a man grown, and his morals were established long ago. It amused him, that’s all. So we, urged on by Johnny, who is crazy to go to the Theatre with a big T, any theatre, and knowing that none of the other pieces now playing are worth seeing from any point of view, remember our old friend’s enthusiasm, and delight Johnny with our consent. Moral: don’t let your children see a play that you have n’t seen yourself.

‘Musical comedy,’however, presents the real difficulty and danger, and it is dangerous because its influences are insidious. A piece comes to town and captivates the whole city. The music is catchy, the girls are pretty, the dances are graceful, the chorus is well drilled, and the ensemble is an artistic masterpiece that delights the eye. We see it and are charmed by it, and we take the children. But when we sit down in cold blood and analyze the thing, we are somewhat horrified to realize the atmosphere we have allowed them to breathe. The scene was laid in Paris. We remember that the hero enters the scene half-drunk, at which every one is mildly amused, that he announces that he has been summoned to attend his lordship, and much to his disgust has had to interrupt a supper-party at which he had been entertaining a party of cocottes over the recollection of whose attractions he smacks his lips, and he then proceeds to sing a song about them in which he calls them all by their pet names. Snatches of this song recur at intervals all through the piece. The young man is a kind of libertine that we should not allow our sons to know in real life, but we have taken them to the theatre to be introduced to him at long range. We remember that the chief comic incident of the play is where a man finds another man, whom he knows to be married, shut up in a summer house with a woman whose identity is a mystery to him, but whom he knows to be not the man’s wife. He peeks through the keyhole and chuckles with glee over what he sees going on inside. Then he suddenly discovers that the woman is his own wife, and — everybody laughs; the theatre is shaken from floor to roof by the public’s appreciation of this humorous situation! You may protest that the whole play is nonsense, and that it is absurd to suggest taking anything in it seriously, — but the protest won’t stand when you are dealing with children and their ideals.

Let us not, however, interrupt our recollections of the play. We remember that the last scene was laid in an immoral resort in Paris, where we would not for worlds allow our sons to go till they had reached years of discretion, — till they had become in fact sufficiently discreet not to want to go there. This scene is so acted in French in Paris itself that the restaurant-life is entirely subordinated to the movement of the play. The manners and customs of this famous resort are not obtruded upon the audience more than can be helped. As we have permitted our boys to see it, however, in New York and Chicago, it is as near an accurate picture of the life of the place as can be put on the stage.

Now, what do our boys take away from such a show besides the recollection of the music? They take away from it, in the first place, a series of photographs of costumes and posturings which we should confiscate with horror if we found them in their possession as actual pasteboard realities. They are none the less real, and we ourselves have furnished them to our boys by taking them to such a play. But that is a small matter in comparison to the fact that they take away with them the idea that drunkenness, infidelity, and immorality are laughing matters. All about them they have seen people laughing at them, and we have been sitting placidly by their sides, laughing too.

The writer begs to be indulged in a bit of personal experience. The strongest influence in his life to keep him from any temptation to the abuse of intoxicants has not been the knowledge of their disastrous effects, it has not been any discourse against their use that he ever read or heard, or even his personal observation of their frightfully demoralizing effect. It has been the recollection of the attitude of mind of his parents toward drunkenness, their horror of it, and their unconcealed disgust when any one made light of it. As soon would he have thought of making a mock of epilepsy in his parents’ presence as of drunkenness. And it is his firm belief that if we wish to instill into our boys a longing for clean living, for purity of mind, and for continence, we can only do it by showing them at every opportunity that we have such a horror of immorality and infidelity that even incongruities which would seem funny to us in any other connection, cannot pierce our repugnance for the nauseating medium in which they are presented.

So we come naturally to the second rule which every parent should follow in connection with his children’s theatre-going. Not only should he know of his own knowledge that the play is worth the child’s seeing, but he should go with him and talk it over with him afterward. Let the children have the benefit of our taste and judgment. If part of the show disgusted us, make it evident to our boys that it did. As we sit beside them and see it through their eyes, we shall find our discrimination wonderfully quickened and our standards wonderfully purified.

By all means, then, send your children sometimes to the theatre; don’t neglect an influence in education so quickening and so potent. Use it, however, with moderation and discrimination, taking only the good. Make it, for your boy, instead of an exciting, debasing thing, a means of teaching reverence for womankind, a tonic for his sense of chivalry, and a reinforcement of this highest of moral ideals, this American ideal of manly pureness. Let the influence of the stage help him so to live that his bride looking straight into his eyes may be content.