The Circus and Other Essays
The Circus
I
Restraint is perhaps the most conspicuous literary virtue of the artists in words who have the pleasant task of describing in programs, in newspaper advertisements, and on posters the excellences of circuses. The litterateur who, possessed of an intimate knowledge of the circus, merely calls it “a new, stupendous, dazzling, magnificent, spectacular, educational, and awe-inspiring conglomeration of marvels, mysteries, mirth, and magic,” deserves praise for a verbal economy almost Greek. For he is not verbose and extravagant, he is taciturn and thrifty; he deliberately uses the mildest instead of the strongest of the adjectives at his disposal.
Shyly, it seems, but in fact artfully, he uses modest terms—“new,” for example, and “spectacular” and “educational.” These are not necessarily words of praise. An epidemic may be new, an earthquake may be spectacular, and even a session of school may be educational. Yet the adjectives proper to these catastrophes are actually applied—in letters of gold and silver and purple—to the circus!
The laureate of the circus, with an æsthetic shrewdness which places him at once on a level with Walter Pater (whose description of the “Mona Lisa,” by the by, is an admirable example of Circus press-agent writing) considers, and rejects as too bewilderingly true, the mightiest of the adjectives that fit his theme. Discreetly he calls it “new” instead of “immemorial”; “educational” instead of “religious.” He does not, as he might, call the circus poetic, he does not call it aristocratic, he does not call it democratic. Yet all these great words are, as he well knows, his to use. The consciousness of his power makes him gentle.
His abnegation becomes the more startlingly virtuous when it is considered that he resists the temptation to use that fascinating device, paradox. For the circus is paradox itself—this reactionary and futuristic exhibition, full of Roman chariots and motor cycles, of high romance and grotesque realism, this demonstration of democracy and aristocracy, equality and subordination, worldliness and religion.
The press agent may, without fear of logical contradiction, call the circus religious. In the old days, he frequently called it a “moral exhibition.” This was to forestall or answer the attacks of the Puritan divines of New England, who railed against the great canvas monster which invaded the sanctity of their villages.
“Moral” was justly used. For surely courage, patience, and industry are the three qualities most obviously exhibited by the silk-and-spangle clad men and women who dance on the perilous wire, fly through space on swiftly swinging bars, and teach a spaniel’s tricks to the man-eating lion.
But the religious value, the formally religious value, of the circus is even more obvious than its moral value. For the circus, more than any other secular institution on the face of the earth, exemplifies—it may be said, flaunts—that virtue which is the very basis of religion, the virtue of faith.
Now, faith is the acceptance of truth without proof. The man who is told and believes that something contrary to his experience will happen has faith. And he who considers the psychology of the audience at a circus, he who (there are scientists sufficiently egotistic) looks into his own soul while a troupe of aërial acrobats are before his physical eyes, will see faith, strong and splendid.
It is not (as some pessimists who never went to a circus would have us believe) the expectation that the performer will fall and be dashed to pieces that makes people enjoy a dangerous act. People are like that only in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the merry pastoral ballads of John Masefield. The circus audience gets its pleasure chiefly from its wholly illogical belief that the performer will not fall and be dashed to pieces; that is, from the exercise of faith. The audience enjoys its irrational faith that Mme. Dupin will safely accomplish the irrational feat of hanging by her teeth from a wire and supporting the weight of all the gold and pink persons who theoretically constitute her family. They enjoy the exercise of this faith, and they enjoy its justification. They really believe, just because a particularly incredible-looking poster tells them so, that there are in the side-show a man with three legs, a woman nine feet tall, and a sword swallower. They give up their money gladly, not to find that the poster was wrong, but because they have faith that it is right. There are no rationalists at the circus.
The audience has faith, and the performers—where would they be without it?—in small fragments, red and white on the tanbark floor. “If the sun and moon should doubt,” remarked William Blake, “they’d immediately go out.” If the lady who rides the motor cycle around the interior of the hollow brass ball, or the gentleman who balances a pool table, two lighted lamps and a feather on his left ear should doubt, they would go out just as promptly. The Peerless Equestrienne believes that she will land on her feet on the cantering white horse’s broad rosined back after that double cart-wheel. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down. By faith the Eight Algerian Aërial Equilibrists stayed up.
You may, of course, try this on your son. As he absorbs the strawed grape juice (degenerate substitute for the pink lemonade of antiquity!), munches the sibilant popcorn and the peanuts which the elephants declined, you may pour into his ears this disquisition on the religiosity of the greatest show on earth. In fact, the best time to preach to a child is while he is staring, with eyes as round as the balloons he is soon to acquire, at the splendors of the three rings. For then there is not the slightest chance of his answering you back, or hearing you.
They are modern enough for anyone, these wandering players. The gymnasts are at home on motor cycles, the clowns sport with burlesque aëroplanes. Yet they are wholesomely reactionary in other respects than those of having chariot races and such unaging feats of skill and strength as may have cheered the hearts of Cæsar’s legionaries. They are reactionary in that they turn man’s newest triumphs into toys. The motor cycle loses its dignity and is no longer an imposing proof of the truth of materialistic philosophy when a girl, built, it seems, of Dresden china, rides it on one wheel over hurdles and through a hoop of flame. And see! Yorick himself, with his old painted grin and suit of motley, makes a Blériot the butt of infinite jest.
The circus is vulgar. Its enemies say so; its friends, with grateful hearts assent. It is vulgar, of the crowd. To no play upon the stage can this lofty praise be given. For the circus as it is to-day would thrill and amuse and delight not only the crowd that to-day see it, but the crowd that might come from the days before the Flood, or from the days of our great-grandchildren’s children. When Adam watched with pleased astonishment an agile monkey leap among the branches of an Eden tree, and laughed at the foolish face of a giraffe, he saw a circus. Delightedly now would he sit upon a rickety chair beneath a canvas roof, smell the romantic aroma of elephant and trampled grass, and look at wonders.
So it is that the vulgarity of the appeal of the circus—its democracy, if you prefer—has no temporal or geographic limits. And the performers themselves are a democracy—the acrobat who somersaults before death’s eyes, the accomplished horseman, the amazing contortionist, the graceful juggler—all these are made equal by the ring, and, furthermore, they must compete for the applause of the throng with roller-skating bears, trained seals, and chalk-faced clowns. Yet there is aristocracy of the ring, and the subordination that Dr. Johnson praised. For here struts the ringmaster, with cracking whip, imperious voice, and marvelous evening clothes; the pageant with which the great show opened had its crowned queen; and even every troop of performing beasts has its four-footed leader.
The stage’s glories have been sung by many a poet. But the circus has had no laureate; it has had to content itself with the passionate prose of its press agent. The loss is poetry’s, not the circus’s. For the circus is itself a poem and a poet—a poem in that it is a lovely and enduring expression of the soul of man, his mirth, and his romance, and a poet in that it is a maker, a creator of splendid fancies in the minds of those who see it.
And there are poets in the circus. They are not, perhaps, the men and women who make their living by their skill and daring, risking their lives to entertain the world. These are not poets; they are artists whose methods are purely objective. No, the subjective artists, the poets, are to be found in the basement, if the show is at the Garden, or, if the show be outside New York they are to be found in the little tents—the side-shows. This is not a mere sneer at the craft of poetry, a mere statement that poets are freaks. Poets are not freaks. But freaks are poets.
Rossetti said it. “Of thine own tears,” he wrote, “thy song must tears beget. O singer, magic mirror hast thou none, save thine own manifest heart.” Behold, therefore, the man on whom a crushing misfortune has come. He puts his grief into fair words, and shows it to the public. Thereby he gets money and fame. Behold, therefore, a man whom misfortune touched before his birth, and dwarfed him, made him a ridiculous image of humanity. He shows his misfortune to the public and gets money and fame thereby. This man exhibits his lack of faith in a sonnet-sequence; that man exhibits his lack of bones in a tent. This poet shows a soul scarred by the cruel whips of injustice; this man a back scarred by the tattooer’s needles.
But the freaks would not like to change places with the poets. The freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets), and they are carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here is a man who lives although his back is broken. There is a crowd around him; how interested they are! Would they be as interested in a poet who lived although his heart was broken? Probably not. But then, there are not many freaks.
II
When Tom Gradgrind (who had, you remember, robbed the Coketown Bank, and been saved from punishment by the amiable intervention of Sleary’s Circus) was living out his exile somewhere in South America, he often longed, Charles Dickens tells us in the engaging tale called “Hard Times,” to be back in England with his sister. But what phase of his dismal boyhood and wasted later years did he see in his homesick dreams? What episodes of his life in England did it give him pleasure to relive in memory?
Dickens does not tell us. But no one who has read “Hard Times” and seen a circus needs to be told. The repentant exile, toiling under the tropic sun, had no affectionate recollections of Stone Lodge, his father’s dreary mansion in Coketown, with its metallurgical cabinet, its conchological cabinet, and its mineralogical cabinet. Nor was it with anything approaching happiness that he thought of the Coketown Bank, the scene of some years of dull labor and of one moment of moral catastrophe.
He remembered, we may be sure, two things. He remembered appearing, with blackened face, an immense waistcoat, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked hat, as one of the comic servants of Jack the Giant-Killer at a certain Grand Morning Performance of Sleary’s Circus. At the time he had been a fugitive from justice, but not even his fear and shame could keep his heart from stirring as he smelled the exhilarating odor of tanbark, trampled grass, and horses, heard the blare of the band, saw the glaring lights and the encircling tiers of applauding people, and knew that he—he, Tom Gradgrind, the oppressed, the crushed, the scientifically educated—was really and truly a circus performer!
And the other recollections, which, after the lapse of many years, still made his heart beat more quickly, had to do with a gap in the pavilion in which Sleary’s Circus once held forth in a suburb of Coketown—a gap through which young Tom Gradgrind delightedly beheld the “graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act” of Miss Josephine Sleary, and strained his astonished young eyes to watch Signore Jupe (none other than Sissy’s father) “elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing dog Merrylegs.”
And the reason why Sleary’s Circus played so glorious a part in the memory of this broken exile was that it had brought into his most prosaic life all the poetry that he had ever known. Surrounded with facts, crammed with facts, educated and governed according to a mechanical system which was an extraordinary foreshadowing of our modern “efficiency,” he was allowed two visits to an enchanted realm, two draughts of the wine of wizardry. Twice in his life he was mysteriously in communion with poetry.
There has been much talk recently about a renascence of poetry, and people have become excited over the fact that so many thousands of copies of Edgar Lee Masters’ book have been sold, and so many more thousands of copies of the late Rupert Brooke’s Collected Poems. This is all very pleasant, but it doesn’t mean that there has been a rebirth of poetry. Poetry cannot be reborn, for poetry has never died.
The circus draws us by the thousands to watch “desperately dangerous displays of unrivaled aërialism,” and “the acme of expert equitation and acrobatic horsemanship” beneath the Diana-guarded roof of Madison Square Garden; even so it drew our fathers and their fathers before them to rickety wooden benches propped against great swaying canvas walls, in the days when Robinson and Lake displayed the wonders of the world in glorious rivalry with Herrings, Cooper and Whitby. Even so will the circus flourish in the days to come, when aëroplanes are cheaper than motor cars, and the war that began in August, 1914, is but a thing of dates and names in dusty textbooks. For poetry is immortal. And the circus is poetry.
What is the function of poetry? Is it not to blend the real and the ideal, to touch the commonplace with lovely dyes of fancy, to tell us (according to Edwin Arlington Robinson), through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said? And is not this exactly what the circus does? Most of its charm is due to the fact that all its wonders are in some way connected with our ordinary life. The elephant in his enclosure at the Zoölogical Gardens is merely a marvel; when he dances the tango or plays the cornet he allies himself with our experience, takes on a whimsical humanity, and thus becomes more marvelous. The elephant in the Zoo is an exhibit; the elephant tangoing in the tanbark ring is poetry.
And there is Zipp, the What-is-it? most venerable of freaks, whose browless tufted head and amazing figure have entertained his visitors since Phineas Taylor Barnum engaged him to ornament his museum on Ann Street. For all I know, Zipp is a poet—his smile is lyrical, and in his roving eyes there is a suggestion of vers libre. But at any rate, Zipp is a poem—a particularly charming poem when, in the procession of freaks which opens the performance, he gallantly leads round the arena that fantastically microcephalous young woman known to fame as the Aztec Queen. The Bearded Lady and the Snake Charmer and the Sword Swallower are poems—poems in the later manner of Thomas Hardy. And that delightfully diminutive chocolate-colored person who rejoices in the name of the Princess Wee-Wee—with her, in her dainty little golden-spangled gown, what lyric of Walter Savage Landor can compare?
It is the splendor of incongruity that gives the equestrian and aërial feats of the arena their charm, that incongruity which is the soul of romance. The creatures we see are the creatures we know, but they have most poetically changed places. It would be the mere prose of our daily life for birds to fly about close to the tent’s roof, and for men and women to ring bells and sit in rocking chairs. It is the poetry of the circus that men and women fly about close to the tent’s roof, and birds ring bells and sit in rocking chairs.
No one can describe a circus in prose. The industrious press agent of the circus long ago gave up the attempt, and resorted to impressionistic free verse, characterized by an ecstasy of alliteration. No one can adequately describe the involved contortions, swings, and dashes of a “family” of silk-clad adventurers on the flying trapeze. No faithful narrative of the grotesque buffetings of the chalk-faced clowns is in itself amusing—and yet the antics of these agile mimes have always been, will always be, irresistibly mirth-compelling. The magic of the circus is compounded of so many things—movement, sound, light, color, odor—that it can never be put into words. It is absurd to attempt to reflect it in prose, and it cannot be reflected in poetry because it is itself poetry; it is the greatest poem in the world.
And just as Sleary’s Circus was the cup of poetry which benevolent fate held twice to the parched lips of young Thomas Gradgrind’s soul, so is the circus of our day, with its regiment of clowns, its roller-skating bears and dancing elephants, its radiant men and women who pirouette on horseback and dart above our heads like swallows, a most wholesome and invigorating tonic for a weary and prosaic generation. We who every morning at the breakfast table read of war and desolation need to cheer our hearts with the burlesque battles of the clowns; we who ride in the subway need to exult when the charioteer, with streaming toga, guides his six white horses on their thunderous course; we whose eyes are daily on our ledgers and sales records need to lift them, if not to the stars, at least to the perilous wire on which a graceful pedestrian gayly flirts with death. We whose lives are prose may well be grateful for the circus, our annual draught of poetry; for the circus, the perennial, irresistible, incomparable, inevitable Renascence of Wonder.