In Memoriam: John Bunny
There was a clown named Joseph Grimaldi. And when his agile limbs and mobile features were stilled by death there lingered in the minds of the thousands who had laughed at him in Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden only the memory of their mirth.
There was a clown named John Bunny. Now he is dead. But we still may see, and our children’s children may see, the gestures and grimaces that made him a welcome visitor in every quarter of the globe. For by grace of the motion-picture camera, John Bunny’s art endures.
It is art, this power of conveying ideas without the use of words, of exciting laughter by actually being, instead of saying, a joke. It is the difficult and venerable art of the clown, the art of the shaven-headed mime in variegated robes whose antics drove care from Cæsar’s furrowed brow, the art of Garrick’s harlequin friend, John Rich, and of the mirth-compelling Pinkethman, whose “frolic gestures” won the praise of Alexander Pope.
Of course, John Bunny could play in speaking parts. Before he found his real vocation, before the motion pictures claimed him as their great comedian, he trod the boards of the “legitimate” stage, and with no small success. He ran the theatrical gamut from minstrelsy to Shakespeare. Annie Russell, Maude Adams, Weber and Fields—these are a few of the stars whose radiance he augmented during the first twenty-five years of his professional life. But to-day the regular drama offers little opportunity to the true clown, and it was not until he appeared on the screen that John Bunny reach his own public—that is, the world.
The word clown has fallen of late years into unmerited disrepute. Impressionistic critics of the drama attempt to disparage a comedian by calling him a “mere clown.” They might as well call Mr. Sargent a “mere painter,” or M. Rodin a “mere sculptor.” What they mean is that the comedian of their discontent is not a clown at all. For the grotesquely clad men, with whitened, expressionless faces, who tumble about the circus ring, have no right to the exclusive possession of their title. Indeed, few of them are genuine clowns in the best sense of the word, for most of them cause laughter by obvious horseplay, not by the true clown methods of elaborate pantomime and striking facial contortions.
The greatest comedians have been the greatest clowns. Even the most brilliant lines, spoken most winningly, fail of their effect upon the audience unless the speaker has a clown’s power to act with his features. And if a clown be great enough he may safely dispense with words—as John Bunny did.
The English pantomime even in Thackeray’s day had fallen from its once high place. The lovely Columbine remained and the sprightly Harlequin and the grotesque Pantaloon. But there were songs and dialogue; the entertainment was simply a sort of vaudeville, not genuine pantomime at all. It was not until the huge, clicking camera made lasting the gestures of the actors that the art of pantomime came back to its own.
There is a word used by men and women who have to do with this great branch of the world’s amusement which deserves immortality. It is the verb “register.” An actor registers grief, or amusement, or astonishment. That is, he assumes an expression which, when recorded by the camera and exhibited, will convey his emotion to the audience. In that one word there is a valuable treatise on the dramatic art. The inferior actor is content with expressing an emotion. The true actor registers it.
And what a sense of permanence is in that word “register!” Alfred de Musset and many another sentimental poet lamented the ephemeral nature of the actor’s fame. The painter, it has been said, the writer and the sculptor, live in their works. But the actor’s art perishes with him; when he dies, the memory of his expressive face and graceful form goes into the oblivion that keeps the echoes of his golden voice.
Well, we have changed all that. The number of people who lose their cares under the spell of John Bunny’s magic to-day is greater than it was a year ago. The motion pictures have made the actor’s chances for immortality equal with those of his fellows in the other arts.
Enemies of the motion picture (there really are such people) say that the humor of such entertainments is not true humor, but vulgar and barbarous horseplay, requiring no art. Anyone, they say, can get a laugh, as Charlie Chaplin does, by being knocked down by an automobile or by being grossly fat, like John Bunny.
The adequate answer to a critic who makes such statements as these is “Go out in the street and get knocked down by an automobile.” This may be the remark which actors (and sensitive producers) commonly feel like making to dramatic critics, but in this case it should have no tinge of bitterness. Go out in the street and get knocked down by an automobile. See if the people laugh at you as they laugh at Chaplin. They will laugh at you only if you are artist enough to be knocked down humorously—as Chaplin is knocked down.
And, as to John Bunny’s success being due to his fatness, that criticism is generally made by people who never saw “Autocrat of Flapjack Junction” or “Love’s Old Dream,” or by rival actors. It is true that your true clown always is quick to utilize his physical peculiarities as accessories to his acting. The jesters of Marie de Medici made fun of their own hunched backs or dwarfed forms. John Bunny had as good a right to turn his fatness into dramatic capital as Sarah Bernhardt has to do the same thing with her slenderness. It is a principle of subjective artistic expression—the same principle as that by which Heine made his little songs out of his great woes.
But the physical peculiarity alone is not enough. John Bunny was gifted by nature for his rôles. But he would have been a great clown even had he been built like John Drew. He would have made his shapeliness what he made his unshapeliness—something ridiculously amusing.
If fatness alone was the source of his success, how crowded his profession would now be! But this is not the case. Thousands, perhaps, of motion-picture audiences have watched Mr. Taft serenely cross the screen, or mutely seem to make a speech. Undoubtedly, they have thereby been edified. But they have not rocked from side to side with unextinguishable laughter, and thereafter burst into shouts of mirth at the mention of the ex-President’s name.
No, people did not laugh at John Bunny because he was fat, or because he fell from horses and automobiles and aëroplanes, and submitted to various picturesque forms of assault and battery for their amusement. They laughed at him because he was fat humorously, because he fell from vehicles humorously, because he was a great clown—that is, a master of a difficult and important branch of dramatic art.
The motion-picture producers may not be aware of the fact, but they have performed a valuable service to the stage in reviving the art of pantomime. The actor in the spoken drama will be less likely to be a mere voice when he sees his brother on the screen act with his whole body.
Is it possible that the importance of the human voice has been exaggerated? Certainly the mechanical reproduction of the spoken word has not captured the world’s attention as has the reproduction of motion. The phonograph, of course, brings the lovely notes of the singers to ears that otherwise would never thrill with melody. It has been used as an instrument by which a political speaker might address at one time twenty audiences scattered across the continent, and it has delighted with humorous dialogue those who were far from theaters. But as an interpreter of great literature, the needle revolves impotently upon its waxen cylinder.
There have been successful attempts to synchronize the phonograph and the motion-picture machine, to cause the words to accompany the action. It may be that these devices will one day be widely popular. But I hope not. For that would destroy the greatest value of motion-picture acting, the silent but complete expression of thought. The motion picture is the renascence of pantomime.
When Colley Cibber looked through his jeweled quizzing glass at a strange dumb-show drama newly brought to England from merry France, a representation of the legend of Venus and Mars, he said that it was “form’d into a connected presentation of Dances in Character, wherein the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so intelligibly told, by a mute Narration of Gesture only, that even thinking Spectators allow’d it both a pleasing and rational Entertainment.” It was this “pleasing and rational Entertainment” which developed into the great English pantomime, which popular custom (always fond of tradition and ritual) honored by association with the mighty festival of Christmas.
And the English pantomime’s greater descendant is to be seen on many a modern film. Still the vivacious lover flees from the comic policemen and the irate father, still Columbine is fair, although she bears a less beautiful name and has changed her airy spangled draperies for a modern garb.
Why has no enterprising producer given us a real old English pantomime in the films, with all the conventional characters? What a Columbine Mary Pickford would make! And how excellently would Charles Chaplin’s deft stumble suit Harlequin! There could be transformation scenes that would delight the genial ghosts of Lamb and Thackeray. But who would be clown—now that John Bunny is dead?
The written word sometimes loses its power to bring laughter as the years roll by. Topical allusions, phrases, and sentiments that amuse us will bring no mirth to the hearts of our grandchildren. But there are certain things that are elementally funny, that make all people laugh who have any laughter in their souls. And one of these things is the face of John Bunny.