Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/360

350[March 13, 1869] their words are set are all in the same vulgar, commonplace style. Half a dozen of these gentlemen will sing at the same hall, on the same night, each about half a dozen songs. Whether the audience want the singer again or no, matters not. Until he has got through the number of songs for which he is engaged, he must be encored, if by nobody else then by the chairman, and "the big Bounce will oblige again." Successful "comiques" will be engaged at two or three halls on the same night, and have to hurry from one to the other in an equipage, usually combining the taste of the late Mr. Thomas Sayers with the professional air of a veterinary surgeon, which the visitor may notice in waiting. There is nothing so remarkable in connection with this subject, as the dreadful uniformity that rules in all these places of entertainment. The same singers, the same acrobats, the same unvarying dull routine, everywhere. For the purposes of this Report, Your Commissioner has visited, he believes, every Music Hall in London; but, whether he was in the far west, where the scarlet jackets of long-legged life-guardsmen gave a pleasant warmth to the scene; or in the remote east, where there was a prevailing flavour of tar and docks all about the room, the entertainment was precisely the same. The little hall in the north is in no way to be distinguished from the larger one in the south. Dulness is the badge of all their tribe.

The comic singer has one redeeming point, which Your Commissioner thinks it fair to mention. He is nearly always vulgar, not unfrequently coarse; but he is never indecent. If credit can be given him for nothing else, he may at least have the credit of invariably keeping within the bounds of propriety.

If Your Commissioner suffered much at the hands, or rather at the brazen throats, of these gentlemen; what is he to say concerning the tremendous performances of the serio-comic ladies? Champagne Charley is bad enough: Champagne Charlotte is intolerable. A foolish and vulgar song from a man's lips, is a sorry matter; but when the dreary business is done by a woman, it is most repulsive.

In these remarks Your Commissioner has treated of comic singers as a class, and an undiverting class; here and there an occasional exception may be found. Your Commissioner has, though rarely, met with a good comic singer; and there are some Music Hall performers, but not many—gentlemen as well as ladies—who are undoubtedly clever and able.

On the whole, except in the case of the comic singers, Your Commissioner finds little amiss at the Music Halls. Of course, if the public like the comic singers, and insist upon hearing them, the public must have its way. No one can suggest any legislative interference with mere nonsense. But the Pandemonium is so striking a warning of what a Music Hall may become, that Your Commissioner is very strongly of opinion that the Music Halls should be put under more efficient supervision than that of the licensing magistrates, and without loss of time.

Your Commissioner will now proceed to the consideration of the state of things, at those places of public entertainment over which your Lordship already has authority.

ought of course to have been well known to Your Commissioner, before he commenced his theatrical labours, that the dramatic art is at a low ebb, and rapidly decaying. It ought to have been known to him that there are no actors now-a-days, and no dramatic authors. It would have been becoming in him to have given up the whole thing as in a bad way. So much to this effect has been said and written, that indeed he had been almost brought to believe it against the evidence of his senses. But the reflection that at all periods of his life he had heard the same story; that the same complaint has been fashionable since the days of Plautus; prevented this charming belief from taking any strong hold upon his mind. With increasing years Your Commissioner had more than once caught himself depreciating the present generation; and had, with shame, found himself saying, on a comedian being praised for his performance in a certain play, "Ah! now Wright could play that part." With shame, for was it not a fact, that when the late Mr. Wright was still diverting the public, seniors in the audience used to make disparaging remarks to that gentleman's detriment, with reference to his predecessor, Mr. John Reeve? Furthermore, "You should have seen Munden, sir," and "There are no actors since John Kemble," are dogmas wearily familiar to most of us. Without violent optimism, Your Commissioner declines to depreciate the merits of the performers of to-day, by comparing them with those of a totally different time, and school of art and taste.