CROOKS AND FAIRIES
A scientific person has been investigating the adventures of children at the “movies.” He wanted to know what sort of films they like best. It is an old controversy. Managers, whether of picture houses or of theatres, are apt to think they know what people like by the stern evidence of the box-office. To which people of superior intelligence, like you and me, reply that people have to take what the managers condescend to provide for them, and that if only the films and the plays put on were works of pure and elevating art they would run for years. “We needs must love the highest when we see it,” as the poet modestly remarks. The sneers of commercial persons that we may love it when we see it but will not pay to see it are justly condemned.
Our investigator of children’s taste did not let himself be swayed by the crude and brutal statistics of money taken at the doors. He asked the children what kind of film they liked best. The results surprise me. Twenty-five per cent. of his children voted for fairy tales. My knowledge of the movies is neither extensive nor peculiar, but I should not have thought they deal much in fairies. I wonder that so large a proportion of children have come to think of a fairy story as a common theme for films. No doubt this is my ignorance. And yet when I recall the queues of children that I have seen at the doors of picture houses and the posters beside them it seems to me that the programmes attracting them seldom have much to do with fairy land.
Is it perhaps possible that they were voting for what they would like rather than for anything they have been able to get? For I will not allow myself to entertain the horrid suspicion that they voted for what they thought they ought to like to please the kind man who was investigating them and to gratify their pastors and masters.
But some of the other results are surprising too. Only 5 per cent. of the children liked “crook” stories. I should have thought that form of art very much more in favour with the young. There is, indeed, a certain lack of precision in the classification. Almost every possible story has a “crook” in it, for the most poetical, the most sternly intellectual of authors cannot get far without a villain.
But for my part I intend to believe that many more than 5 per cent. of children like a “crook” story if we interpret “crook” in the rational way as including anybody and everybody from Robin Hood to Jimmy Valentine who broke the law. What I don’t understand is the sharp distinction between the fairy story and the crook story. What were the villains of the fairy tales, the giants, ogres, wicked step-mothers but “crooks”? And I fear we must add that some of the heroes were not wholly and absolutely virtuous. Jack of the Bean Stalk, for instance, and Aladdin were not quite saintly youths.
It will pain you much to hear that only 2 per cent. of the children would admit a liking for “educational” films. I don’t know what that kind of entertainment may be, but I have qualms about it. I suspect it of a resemblance to certain plays and novels much esteemed by the truly intellectual, works of art the character whereof is rather negative than positive. Such things sternly avoid any attempt to excite us, abstain from incident and from vivacity of dialogue and from anything like a surprise. Which clearly proves that they are of a higher and more spiritual nature than the stuff which pleases the ignoble vulgar.