Rosalie Street has taken to ╥the pictures╙, of that there can be no doubt. And as there are many Rosalie Streets, which tend rather to increase than to diminish in number, and as the pictures have come to stay, it is well that our social philosophers and philanthropists should take stock. Life in Rosalie Street has hitherto been dull-grey, with here and there a patch of purple or scarlet ╤ a wedding, a funeral, a scandal. It has been a sluggish stream, of brackish flavour, which on occasion can break into swirls and rapids, presently to flow on again in oily smoothness. Not precisely a joyless life nor a life lived in negation of God; only a torpid, base life of mostly unmurmuring content, unfit in the main for such a being as man in such a world as this. But Rosalie Street has suddenly found the lust of the eye, and delights in the gratification of it. It has discovered a way of escape from the squalid monochrome, of which, it is true, it has hitherto reeked but little. Every evening a magic carpet transports half of us, men, women, and children, to a region which we can explore with something of the joy of a traveller from chill northern lands in an unvisited country of tropical refulgence where it is always afternoon.
The pictures offer two clear advantages to Rosalie Street. First, they are cheap, and, next, they do not ask for any effort. Consider what these advantages mean. You walk seventy yards round the corner, you pay twopence, and the thing is done. You may have your two hours╒ revel with nothing to trouble you. You sit in a pleasant torpor, only the eyes of you and what the physiologists call the visual centres awake, and you are conducted from scene to scene. Indian war-trail, the shifts of the enterprising burglar, hair-breadth escapes in the deadly breach, the drama of jealousy and revenge, things of which you have heard but which you have never seen until now flit before you. There you sit in the reek of thick twist ╤ your own and that of a hundred others ╤ with no squalling children to moider you, no querulous wife to nag you into the disquiet that is as near akin to torture as you can get. What competing attraction can really vie with this? Not the meetings at the Primitive Methodist chapel. They call for co-operative sympathy, for some exertion, and something in the way of clothes and sixpences. Not even the music-hall, whose artists must be paid. Not always the public-house, as we shall see. The widest range of delights that come to a man are mediated by the eye. Vision, the authorities tell us, is the highest and the most intellectual of the senses, and I do not suppose that the advent of the pictures will induce them to revise their estimate. But how is it that humanity has been so long in appropriating this truth? How is it that it has burst upon us, with all the explosive force of a consuming passion and with the shattering power of an anarchic creed, within seven short years?
The pictures threaten all kinds of interests. They menace the churches and friendly societies, certain theatres and goose clubs, with unheeding impartiality. They intercept the ╥saving╙ pennies of school children with the same frigid indifference as they steal away their aptitude for school tasks. They attack even the hitherto impregnable entrenchments of the public-house, though there their assault is delivered with doubtful success. It depends where the public-house is situated. If the Lamb and Flag in Corkscrew Lane has been drained of a good half of its best customers, the Old House-at-Home, opposite the picture-house round the corner, which used to do two barrels a week, is now, to my certain knowledge, doing fourteen. Far-sighted men in quest of 10 per cent are possessing themselves of those houses of refreshment which are in close proximity to the pictures.
But have the pictures no more serious and far-reaching effects than these? Certainly they have, though it were too long a story to tell of all of them. Stand opposite our Picture-house on a Monday afternoon, a quarter of an hour before the orgy begins. You will see a crowd of women, frowsy, unkempt, unwashed. You see tattered skirts, with the gathered filth of years upon them, blouses innocent of half the buttons that decency requires, wizened babes bundled into shawls that know not the wash-tub. Within these doors is Paradise, to be purchased with the price of wifely and motherly duty, and not only to-day but as often as the twopences are forthcoming and the duty may be neglected with impunity. Think of the case of Elsie, aged eleven, who lives at No. 47, for it is a typical and very common case. Elsie was sent on Tuesday to buy a pound of ninepenny margarine. She bought eightpenny instead, and the stolen penny admitted her to watch a mimicry, not of normal life but of life in spasms, an hour later. The fact that her fraud was discovered and met with its proper punishment will not deter Elsie. She will repeat her offence, and what will be the end thereof? Take your stand at the same place at an hour when all English children should long have been abed, and watch the anaemic, whittled samples of English childhood who shoal out of the Picture-house, to go home to slumbers all too short and vexed with dreams of the exploits of Jim and Cracksman and Moose Jaw╒s scalping raid.
You will not need much art of persuasion to convince you that a new foe has come to assail our manhood and womanhood, a foe which may possibly be converted into a friend if its activities are regulated and strictly and accurately restricted; not otherwise. What think you of a boy who will spend twopence on the pictures to-night, and to-morrow will be begging for the bread which the twopence should have bought? In Rosalie Street the thing happens frequently. No device for the recreation of men which has claimed even a conditional ethical sanction has ever been so capable of working harmful effects. Nothing promises to bite so deep into our civilization as this newest diversion. Not drink nor even gambling is so potent an instrument for the undoing of a people. For the habit of ╥the pictures╙ makes its almost irresistible appeal to man in the making, to children, to the unformed and immature. It seduces them, without advertising its corruptive potency. It divorces recreation from activity of mind and body more completely than any pastime which the wit of man has invented. It offers to supply amusement and interest without any purchase price in exertion and fatigue, which normally ought to be paid by growing creatures for all their delights. It exaggerates the emotional elements of the soul at the cost of the energy of will and of the intellect. Consequently its tendency is to produce a febrile type of character, feeble in self-direction, hungry for pleasure, and expectant of it without the preliminary tax which makes pleasure healthful. As an occasional relaxation it might, when intelligently controlled, be a valuable savour added to life. As a habit, controlled or uncontrolled, it is a menace which calls for the prompt and serious attention of all lovers of their kind. There are evils which have sported with the weakness and subdued the strength of all human contrivances to vanish them. The Picture habit is not yet one of these. But presently it may be, for great ╥vested interests╙ are at last attaching themselves to it.
