ase from one of Mr Bennett's novels about the books that cheer us
all up. It was a most unfortunate phrase to quote in public. It
confirmed every bald old scaramouch in all his hostilities to realism,
tragedy, and every other form of literature that does not go about
with its hat over its eye. It also confirmed a popular prejudice to
the effect that it is the duty of men of letters to be cheerful in a
way in which it is not the duty, say, of mathematicians to be
cheerful. Now, one need not be an enemy of cheerfulness to detest this
theory. One merely needs to be sufficiently awake to recognise that
cheerfulness may easily become a tyranny which will bind the hands and
feet of literature as it has already bound the hands and feet of
drama. Cheerfulness, cheerfulness, and yet again cheerfulness, is the
all too golden rule in the theatre. One result of this is that Ibsen
has been expelled from the stage for the only naughtiness of which the
English theatre takes notice--the naughtiness of being serious. Even
Mr Shaw, who possesses the comic spirit in greater abundance than any
other writer of his time, is flayed alive by the critics on the
production of each new play he writes, because, besides being
cheerful, he is a man of ideas. It is not enough that you should be
cheerful: you must be cheerful to the exclusion of everything
else--everything, at least, that might bring unrest to the intellect
or the spirit or to any other part of a man except the muscles that
work the oil-wells of sentiment and the creaking jaws of laughter. The
consequences might have been foreseen. No one unaided, could be quite
so inhumanly vacuous as the audiences in the theatres expected him to
be. And so the dramatic author had to call in to his aid the
musicians, the poets, the limelight-men, the mask-sellers, the dancing
girls, the dressmakers, and a host of other people, each of whom
separately could only be a little inane, but all of whom together
could be overwhelmingly inane; and among them they produced that
overwhelming inanity, musical comedy. There you have the ultimate
logic of cheerfulness in the theatre. It is like the obtrusive
cheerfulness of the performing animals in music-halls. It is a tedious
and beastly thing. It is cheerfulness without mind or meaning. It is
like a laugh painted on a clown's face. Compulsory cheerfulness must
always end like that, because, if one has to laugh all the time, it is
far easier to put the laugh on w