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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stage-Land, by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Stage-Land
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+Posting Date: July 27, 2008 [EBook #858]
+Release Date: March 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STAGE-LAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte
+
+
+
+
+
+STAGE-LAND.
+
+by Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+TO
+
+THAT HIGHLY RESPECTABLE BUT UNNECESSARILY
+
+RETIRING INDIVIDUAL,
+
+OF WHOM
+
+WE HEAR SO MUCH
+
+BUT
+
+SEE SO LITTLE,
+
+"THE EARNEST STUDENT OF THE DRAMA,"
+
+THIS
+
+(COMPARATIVELY) TRUTHFUL LITTLE BOOK
+
+IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+     THE HERO
+     THE VILLAIN
+     THE HEROINE
+     THE COMIC MAN
+     THE LAWYER
+     THE ADVENTURESS
+     THE SERVANT GIRL
+     THE CHILD
+     THE COMIC LOVERS
+     THE PEASANTS
+     THE GOOD OLD MAN
+     THE IRISHMAN
+     THE DETECTIVE
+     THE SAILOR
+
+
+
+
+STAGE-LAND.
+
+
+
+
+THE HERO.
+
+His name is George, generally speaking. "Call me George!" he says to the
+heroine. She calls him George (in a very low voice, because she is so
+young and timid). Then he is happy.
+
+The stage hero never has any work to do. He is always hanging about and
+getting into trouble. His chief aim in life is to be accused of crimes
+he has never committed, and if he can muddle things up with a corpse in
+some complicated way so as to get himself reasonably mistaken for the
+murderer, he feels his day has not been wasted.
+
+He has a wonderful gift of speech and a flow of language calculated
+to strike terror to the bravest heart. It is a grand thing to hear him
+bullyragging the villain.
+
+The stage hero is always entitled to "estates," chiefly remarkable for
+their high state of cultivation and for the eccentric ground plan of the
+"manor house" upon them. The house is never more than one story high,
+but it makes up in green stuff over the porch what it lacks in size and
+convenience.
+
+The chief drawback in connection with it, to our eyes, is that all
+the inhabitants of the neighboring village appear to live in the front
+garden, but the hero evidently thinks it rather nice of them, as it
+enables him to make speeches to them from the front doorstep--his
+favorite recreation.
+
+There is generally a public-house immediately opposite. This is handy.
+
+These "estates" are a great anxiety to the stage hero. He is not what
+you would call a business man, as far as we can judge, and his attempts
+to manage his own property invariably land him in ruin and distraction.
+His "estates," however, always get taken away from him by the villain
+before the first act is over, and this saves him all further trouble
+with regard to them until the end of the play, when he gets saddled with
+them once more.
+
+Not but what it must be confessed that there is much excuse for the poor
+fellow's general bewilderment concerning his affairs and for his legal
+errors and confusions generally. Stage "law" may not be quite the most
+fearful and wonderful mystery in the whole universe, but it's near
+it--very near it. We were under the impression at one time that we
+ourselves knew something--just a little--about statutory and common law,
+but after paying attention to the legal points of one or two plays we
+found that we were mere children at it.
+
+We thought we would not be beaten, and we determined to get to the
+bottom of stage law and to understand it; but after some six months'
+effort our brain (a singularly fine one) began to soften, and we
+abandoned the study, believing it would come cheaper in the end to offer
+a suitable reward, of about 50,000 pounds or 60,000 pounds, say, to any
+one who would explain it to us.
+
+The reward has remained unclaimed to the present day and is still open.
+
+One gentleman did come to our assistance a little while ago, but his
+explanations only made the matter more confusing to our minds than it
+was before. He was surprised at what he called our density, and said the
+thing was all clear and simple to him. But we discovered afterward that
+he was an escaped lunatic.
+
+The only points of stage "law" on which we are at all clear are as
+follows:
+
+That if a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to
+the nearest villain.
+
+But if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to
+whoever can get possession of that will.
+
+That the accidental loss of the three-and-sixpenny copy of a marriage
+certificate annuls the marriage.
+
+That the evidence of one prejudiced witness of shady antecedents is
+quite sufficient to convict the most stainless and irreproachable
+gentleman of crimes for the committal of which he could have had no
+possible motive.
+
+But that this evidence may be rebutted years afterward, and the
+conviction quashed without further trial by the unsupported statement of
+the comic man.
+
+That if A forges B's name to a check, then the law of the land is that B
+shall be sentenced to ten years' penal servitude.
+
+That ten minutes' notice is all that is required to foreclose a
+mortgage.
+
+That all trials of criminal cases take place in the front parlor of the
+victim's house, the villain acting as counsel, judge, and jury rolled
+into one, and a couple of policemen being told off to follow his
+instructions.
+
+These are a few of the more salient features of stage "law" so far as
+we have been able to grasp it up to the present; but as fresh acts and
+clauses and modifications appear to be introduced for each new play,
+we have abandoned all hope of ever being able to really comprehend the
+subject.
+
+To return to our hero, the state of the law, as above sketched,
+naturally confuses him, and the villain, who is the only human being who
+does seem to understand stage legal questions, is easily able to fleece
+and ruin him. The simple-minded hero signs mortgages, bills of sale,
+deeds of gift, and such like things, under the impression that he is
+playing some sort of a round game; and then when he cannot pay the
+interest they take his wife and children away from him and turn him
+adrift into the world.
+
+Being thrown upon his own resources, he naturally starves.
+
+He can make long speeches, he can tell you all his troubles, he can
+stand in the lime-light and strike attitudes, he can knock the villain
+down, and he can defy the police, but these requirements are not much
+in demand in the labor market, and as they are all he can do or cares
+to do, he finds earning his living a much more difficult affair than he
+fancied.
+
+There is a deal too much hard work about it for him. He soon gives
+up trying it at all, and prefers to eke out an uncertain existence by
+sponging upon good-natured old Irish women and generous but weak-minded
+young artisans who have left their native village to follow him and
+enjoy the advantage of his company and conversation.
+
+And so he drags out his life during the middle of the piece, raving at
+fortune, raging at humanity, and whining about his miseries until the
+last act.
+
+Then he gets back those "estates" of his into his possession once again,
+and can go back to the village and make more moral speeches and be
+happy.
+
+Moral speeches are undoubtedly his leading article, and of these, it
+must be owned, he has an inexhaustible stock. He is as chock-full of
+noble sentiments as a bladder is of wind. They are weak and watery
+sentiments of the sixpenny tea-meeting order. We have a dim notion that
+we have heard them before. The sound of them always conjures up to our
+mind the vision of a dull long room, full of oppressive silence, broken
+only by the scratching of steel pens and an occasional whispered "Give
+us a suck, Bill. You know I always liked you;" or a louder "Please, sir,
+speak to Jimmy Boggles. He's a-jogging my elbow."
+
+The stage hero, however, evidently regards these meanderings as gems of
+brilliant thought, fresh from the philosophic mine.
+
+The gallery greets them with enthusiastic approval. They are a
+warm-hearted people, galleryites, and they like to give a hearty welcome
+to old friends.
+
+And then, too, the sentiments are so good and a British gallery is so
+moral. We doubt if there could be discovered on this earth any body of
+human beings half so moral--so fond of goodness, even when it is
+slow and stupid--so hateful of meanness in word or deed--as a modern
+theatrical gallery.
+
+The early Christian martyrs were sinful and worldly compared with an
+Adelphi gallery.
+
+The stage hero is a very powerful man. You wouldn't think it to look at
+him, but you wait till the heroine cries "Help! Oh, George, save me!" or
+the police attempt to run him in. Then two villains, three extra hired
+ruffians and four detectives are about his fighting-weight.
+
+If he knocks down less than three men with one blow, he fears that he
+must be ill, and wonders "Why this strange weakness?"
+
+The hero has his own way of making love. He always does it from behind.
+The girl turns away from him when he begins (she being, as we have
+said, shy and timid), and he takes hold of her hands and breathes his
+attachment down her back.
+
+The stage hero always wears patent-leather boots, and they are always
+spotlessly clean. Sometimes he is rich and lives in a room with seven
+doors to it, and at other times he is starving in a garret; but in
+either event he still wears brand-new patent-leather boots.
+
+He might raise at least three-and-sixpence on those boots, and when the
+baby is crying for food, it occurs to us that it would be better if,
+instead of praying to Heaven, he took off those boots and pawned them;
+but this does not seem to occur to him.
+
+He crosses the African desert in patent-leather boots, does the stage
+hero. He takes a supply with him when he is wrecked on an uninhabited
+island. He arrives from long and trying journeys; his clothes are ragged
+and torn, but his boots are new and shiny. He puts on patent-leather
+boots to tramp through the Australian bush, to fight in Egypt, to
+discover the north pole.
+
+Sometimes he is a gold-digger, sometimes a dock laborer, sometimes a
+soldier, sometimes a sailor, but whatever he is he wears patent-leather
+boots.
+
+He goes boating in patent leather boots, he plays cricket in them;
+he goes fishing and shooting in them. He will go to heaven in
+patent-leather boots or he will decline the invitation.
+
+The stage hero never talks in a simple, straightforward way, like a mere
+ordinary mortal.
+
+"You will write to me when you are away, dear, won't you?" says the
+heroine.
+
+A mere human being would reply:
+
+"Why, of course I shall, ducky, every day."
+
+But the stage hero is a superior creature. He says:
+
+"Dost see yonder star, sweet?"
+
+She looks up and owns that she does see yonder star; and then off he
+starts and drivels on about that star for full five minutes, and says he
+will cease to write to her when that pale star has fallen from its place
+amid the firmament of heaven.
+
+The result of a long course of acquaintanceship with stage heroes has
+been, so far as we are concerned, to create a yearning for a new kind of
+stage hero. What we would like for a change would be a man who wouldn't
+cackle and brag quite so much, but who was capable of taking care of
+himself for a day without getting into trouble.
+
+
+
+
+THE VILLAIN.
+
+He wears a clean collar and smokes a cigarette; that is how we know he
+is a villain. In real life it is often difficult to tell a villain from
+an honest man, and this gives rise to mistakes; but on the stage, as we
+have said villains wear clean collars and smoke cigarettes, and thus all
+fear of blunder is avoided.
+
+It is well that the rule does not hold off the stage, or good men
+might be misjudged. We ourselves, for instance, wear a clean
+collar--sometimes.
+
+It might be very awkward for our family, especially on Sundays.
+
+He has no power of repartee, has the stage villain. All the good people
+in the play say rude and insulting things to him, and smack at him,
+and score off him all through the act, but he can never answer them
+back--can never think of anything clever to say in return.
+
+"Ha! ha! wait till Monday week," is the most brilliant retort that he
+can make, and he has to get into a corner by himself to think of even
+that.
+
+The stage villain's career is always very easy and prosperous up to
+within a minute of the end of each act. Then he gets suddenly let in,
+generally by the comic man. It always happens so. Yet the villain is
+always intensely surprised each time. He never seems to learn anything
+from experience.
+
+A few years ago the villain used to be blessed with a hopeful and
+philosophical temperament, which enabled him to bear up under these
+constantly recurring disappointments and reverses. It was "no matter,"
+he would say. Crushed for the moment though he might be, his buoyant
+heart never lost courage. He had a simple, child-like faith in
+Providence. "A time will come," he would remark, and this idea consoled
+him.
+
+Of late, however, this trusting hopefulness of his, as expressed in the
+beautiful lines we have quoted, appears to have forsaken him. We are
+sorry for this. We always regarded it as one of the finest traits in his
+character.
+
+The stage villain's love for the heroine is sublime in its
+steadfastness. She is a woman of lugubrious and tearful disposition,
+added to which she is usually incumbered with a couple of priggish and
+highly objectionable children, and what possible attraction there
+is about her we ourselves can never understand; but the stage
+villain--well, there, he is fairly mashed on her.
+
+Nothing can alter his affection. She hates him and insults him to an
+extent that is really unladylike. Every time he tries to explain his
+devotion to her, the hero comes in and knocks him down in the middle
+of it, or the comic man catches him during one or the other of his
+harassing love-scenes with her, and goes off and tells the "villagers"
+or the "guests," and they come round and nag him (we should think that
+the villain must grow to positively dislike the comic man before the
+piece is over).
+
+Notwithstanding all this he still hankers after her and swears she shall
+be his. He is not a bad-looking fellow, and from what we know of the
+market, we should say there are plenty of other girls who would jump at
+him; yet for the sake of settling down with this dismal young female as
+his wife, he is prepared to go through a laborious and exhaustive course
+of crime and to be bullied and insulted by every one he meets. His love
+sustains him under it all. He robs and forges, and cheats, and lies, and
+murders, and arsons. If there were any other crimes he could commit to
+win her affection, he would, for her sweet sake, commit them cheerfully.
+But he doesn't know any others--at all events, he is not well up in any
+others--and she still does not care for him, and what is he to do?
+
+It is very unfortunate for both of them. It is evident to the merest
+spectator that the lady's life would be much happier if the villain did
+not love her quite so much; and as for him, his career might be calmer
+and less criminal but for his deep devotion to her.
+
+You see, it is having met her in early life that is the cause of all the
+trouble. He first saw her when she was a child, and he loved her, "ay,
+even then." Ah, and he would have worked--slaved for her, and have made
+her rich and happy. He might perhaps even have been a good man.
+
+She tries to soothe him. She says she loathed him with an unspeakable
+horror from the first moment that her eyes met his revolting form. She
+says she saw a hideous toad once in a nasty pond, and she says that
+rather would she take that noisome reptile and clasp its slimy bosom to
+her own than tolerate one instant's touch from his (the villain's) arms.
+
+This sweet prattle of hers, however, only charms him all the more. He
+says he will win her yet.
+
+Nor does the villain seem much happier in his less serious love
+episodes. After he has indulged in a little badinage of the above
+character with his real lady-love, the heroine, he will occasionally try
+a little light flirtation passage with her maid or lady friend.
+
+The maid or friend does not waste time in simile or in metaphor. She
+calls him a black-hearted scoundrel and clumps him over the head.
+
+Of recent years it has been attempted to cheer the stage villain's
+loveless life by making the village clergyman's daughter gone on him.
+But it is generally about ten years ago when even she loved him, and her
+love has turned to hate by the time the play opens; so that on the whole
+his lot can hardly be said to have been much improved in this direction.
+
+Not but what it must be confessed that her change of feeling is, under
+the circumstances, only natural. He took her away from her happy,
+peaceful home when she was very young and brought her up to this wicked
+overgrown London. He did not marry her. There is no earthly reason why
+he should not have married her. She must have been a fine girl at that
+time (and she is a good-looking woman as it is, with dash and go about
+her), and any other man would have settled down cozily with her and have
+led a simple, blameless life.
+
+But the stage villain is built cussed.
+
+He ill-uses this female most shockingly--not for any cause or motive
+whatever; indeed, his own practical interests should prompt him to treat
+her well and keep friends with her--but from the natural cussedness to
+which we have just alluded. When he speaks to her he seizes her by the
+wrist and breathes what he's got to say into her ear, and it tickles and
+revolts her.
+
+The only thing in which he is good to her is in the matter of dress. He
+does not stint her in dress.
+
+The stage villain is superior to the villain of real life. The villain
+of real life is actuated by mere sordid and selfish motives. The stage
+villain does villainy, not for any personal advantage to himself, but
+merely from the love of the thing as an art. Villainy is to him its own
+reward; he revels in it.
+
+"Better far be poor and villainous," he says to himself, "than possess
+all the wealth of the Indies with a clear conscience. I will be a
+villain," he cries. "I will, at great expense and inconvenience to
+myself, murder the good old man, get the hero accused of the crime,
+and make love to his wife while he is in prison. It will be a risky and
+laborious business for me from beginning to end, and can bring me no
+practical advantage whatever. The girl will call me insulting names when
+I pay her a visit, and will push me violently in the chest when I get
+near her; her golden-haired infant will say I am a bad man and may even
+refuse to kiss me. The comic man will cover me with humorous opprobrium,
+and the villagers will get a day off and hang about the village pub and
+hoot me. Everybody will see through my villainy, and I shall be nabbed
+in the end. I always am. But it is no matter, I will be a villain--ha!
+ha!"
+
+On the whole, the stage villain appears to us to be a rather badly used
+individual. He never has any "estates" or property himself, and his
+only chance of getting on in the world is to sneak the hero's. He has
+an affectionate disposition, and never having any wife of his own he is
+compelled to love other people's; but his affection is ever unrequited,
+and everything comes wrong for him in the end.
+
+Our advice to stage villains generally, after careful observation of
+(stage) life and (stage) human nature, is as follows:
+
+Never be a stage villain at all if you can help it. The life is too
+harassing and the remuneration altogether disproportionate to the risks
+and labor.
+
+If you have run away with the clergyman's daughter and she still clings
+to you, do not throw her down in the center of the stage and call her
+names. It only irritates her, and she takes a dislike to you and goes
+and warns the other girl.
+
+Don't have too many accomplices; and if you have got them, don't keep
+sneering at them and bullying them. A word from them can hang you, and
+yet you do all you can to rile them. Treat them civilly and let them
+have their fair share of the swag.
+
+Beware of the comic man. When you are committing a murder or robbing a
+safe you never look to see where the comic man is. You are so careless
+in that way. On the whole, it might be as well if you murdered the comic
+man early in the play.
+
+Don't make love to the hero's wife. She doesn't like you; how can you
+expect her to? Besides, it isn't proper. Why don't you get a girl of
+your own?
+
+Lastly, don't go down to the scenes of your crimes in the last act. You
+always will do this. We suppose it is some extra cheap excursion down
+there that attracts you. But take our advice and don't go. That
+is always where you get nabbed. The police know your habits from
+experience. They do not trouble to look for you. They go down in the
+last act to the old hall or the ruined mill where you did the deed and
+wait for you.
+
+In nine cases out of ten you would get off scot-free but for this
+idiotic custom of yours. Do keep away from the place. Go abroad or to
+the sea-side when the last act begins and stop there till it is over.
+You will be safe then.
+
+
+
+
+THE HEROINE.
+
+She is always in trouble--and don't she let you know it, too! Her life
+is undeniably a hard one. Nothing goes right with her. We all have our
+troubles, but the stage heroine never has anything else. If she only got
+one afternoon a week off from trouble or had her Sundays free it would
+be something.
+
+But no; misfortune stalks beside her from week's beginning to week's
+end.
+
+After her husband has been found guilty of murder, which is about the
+least thing that can ever happen to him, and her white-haired father has
+become a bankrupt and has died of a broken heart, and the home of
+her childhood has been sold up, then her infant goes and contracts a
+lingering fever.
+
+She weeps a good deal during the course of her troubles, which we
+suppose is only natural enough, poor woman. But it is depressing from
+the point of view of the audience, and we almost wish before the evening
+is out that she had not got quite so much trouble.
+
+It is over the child that she does most of her weeping. The child has
+a damp time of it altogether. We sometimes wonder that it never catches
+rheumatism.
+
+She is very good, is the stage heroine. The comic man expresses a belief
+that she is a born angel. She reproves him for this with a tearful smile
+(it wouldn't be her smile if it wasn't tearful).
+
+"Oh, no," she says (sadly of course); "I have many, many faults."
+
+We rather wish that she would show them a little more. Her excessive
+goodness seems somehow to pall upon us. Our only consolation while
+watching her is that there are not many good women off the stage. Life
+is bad enough as it is; if there were many women in real life as good as
+the stage heroine, it would be unbearable.
+
+The stage heroine's only pleasure in life is to go out in a snow-storm
+without an umbrella and with no bonnet on. She has a bonnet, we know
+(rather a tasteful little thing); we have seen it hanging up behind the
+door of her room; but when she comes out for a night stroll during a
+heavy snow-storm (accompanied by thunder), she is most careful to leave
+it at home. Maybe she fears the snow will spoil it, and she is a careful
+girl.
+
+She always brings her child out with her on these occasions. She seems
+to think that it will freshen it up. The child does not appreciate the
+snow as much as she does. He says it's cold.
+
+One thing that must irritate the stage heroine very much on these
+occasions is the way in which the snow seems to lie in wait for her
+and follow her about. It is quite a fine night before she comes on the
+scene: the moment she appears it begins to snow. It snows heavily all
+the while she remains about, and the instant she goes it clears up again
+and keeps dry for the rest of the evening.
+
+The way the snow "goes" for that poor woman is most unfair. It always
+snows much heavier in the particular spot where she is sitting than it
+does anywhere else in the whole street. Why, we have sometimes seen a
+heroine sitting in the midst of a blinding snow-storm while the other
+side of the road was as dry as a bone. And it never seemed to occur to
+her to cross over.
+
+We have even known a more than unusually malignant snow-storm to follow
+a heroine three times round the stage and then go off (R.) with her.
+
+Of course you can't get away from a snow-storm like that! A stage
+snow-storm is the kind of snow-storm that would follow you upstairs and
+want to come into bed with you.
+
+Another curious thing about these stage snow-storms is that the moon is
+always shining brightly through the whole of them. And it shines only on
+the heroine, and it follows her about just like the snow does.
+
+Nobody fully understands what a wonderful work of nature the moon is
+except people acquainted with the stage. Astronomy teaches you something
+about the moon, but you learn a good deal more from a few visits to
+a theater. You will find from the latter that the moon only shines on
+heroes and heroines, with perhaps an occasional beam on the comic man:
+it always goes out when it sees the villain coming.
+
+It is surprising, too, how quickly the moon can go out on the stage.
+At one moment it is riding in full radiance in the midst of a cloudless
+sky, and the next instant it is gone! Just as though it had been turned
+off at a meter. It makes you quite giddy at first until you get used to
+it.
+
+The stage heroine is inclined to thoughtfulness rather than gayety.
+
+In her cheerful moments the stage heroine thinks she sees the spirit of
+her mother, or the ghost of her father, or she dreams of her dead baby.
+
+But this is only in her very merry moods. As a rule, she is too much
+occupied with weeping to have time for frivolous reflections.
+
+She has a great flow of language and a wonderful gift of metaphor and
+simile--more forcible than elegant--and this might be rather trying in
+a wife under ordinary circumstances. But as the hero is generally
+sentenced to ten years' penal servitude on his wedding-morn, he escapes
+for a period from a danger that might well appall a less fortunate
+bridegroom.
+
+Sometimes the stage heroine has a brother, and if so he is sure to be
+mistaken for her lover. We never came across a brother and sister in
+real life who ever gave the most suspicious person any grounds for
+mistaking them for lovers; but the stage brother and sister are so
+affectionate that the error is excusable.
+
+And when the mistake does occur and the husband comes in suddenly and
+finds them kissing and raves she doesn't turn round and say:
+
+"Why, you silly cuckoo, it's only my brother."
+
+That would be simple and sensible, and would not suit the stage heroine
+at all. No; she does all in her power to make everybody believe it is
+true, so that she can suffer in silence.
+
+She does so love to suffer.
+
+Marriage is undoubtedly a failure in the case of the stage heroine.
+
+If the stage heroine were well advised she would remain single. Her
+husband means well. He is decidedly affectionate. But he is unfortunate
+and inexperienced in worldly affairs. Things come right for him at the
+end of the play, it is true; but we would not recommend the heroine
+to place too much reliance upon the continuance of this happy state
+of affairs. From what we have seen of her husband and his business
+capabilities during the five acts preceding, we are inclined to doubt
+the possibility of his being anything but unfortunate to the end of his
+career.
+
+True, he has at last got his "rights" (which he would never have lost
+had he had a head instead of a sentimental bladder on his shoulders),
+the Villain is handcuffed, and he and the heroine have settled down
+comfortably next door to the comic man.
+
+But this heavenly existence will never last. The stage hero was built
+for trouble, and he will be in it again in another month, you bet.
+They'll get up another mortgage for him on the "estates;" and he won't
+know, bless you, whether he really did sign it or whether he didn't, and
+out he will go.
+
+And he'll slop his name about to documents without ever looking to see
+what he's doing, and be let in for Lord knows what; and another wife
+will turn up for him that he had married when a boy and forgotten all
+about.
+
+And the next corpse that comes to the village he'll get mixed up
+with--sure to--and have it laid to his door, and there'll be all the old
+business over again.
+
+No, our advice to the stage heroine is to get rid of the hero as soon as
+possible, marry the villain, and go and live abroad somewhere where the
+comic man won't come fooling around.
+
+She will be much happier.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMIC MAN.
+
+He follows the hero all over the world. This is rough on the hero.
+
+What makes him so gone on the hero is that when they were boys together
+the hero used to knock him down and kick him. The comic man remembers
+this with a glow of pride when he is grown up, and it makes him love the
+hero and determine to devote his life to him.
+
+He is a man of humble station--the comic man. The village blacksmith or
+a peddler. You never see a rich or aristocratic comic man on the stage.
+You can have your choice on the stage; you can be funny and of lowly
+origin, or you can be well-to-do and without any sense of humor. Peers
+and policemen are the people most utterly devoid of humor on the stage.
+
+The chief duty of the comic man's life is to make love to servant-girls,
+and they slap his face; but it does not discourage him; he seems to be
+more smitten by them than ever.
+
+The comic man is happy under any fate, and he says funny things at
+funerals and when the bailiffs are in the house or the hero is waiting
+to be hanged.
+
+This sort of man is rather trying in real life. In real life such a man
+would probably be slaughtered to death and buried at an early period of
+his career, but on the stage they put up with him.
+
+He is very good, is the comic man. He can't bear villainy. To thwart
+villainy is his life's ambition, and in this noble object fortune backs
+him up grandly. Bad people come and commit their murders and thefts
+right under his nose, so that he can denounce them in the last act.
+
+They never see him there, standing close beside them, while they are
+performing these fearful crimes.
+
+It is marvelous how short-sighted people on the stage are. We always
+thought that the young lady in real life was moderately good at not
+seeing folks she did not want to when they were standing straight
+in front of her, but her affliction in this direction is as nothing
+compared with that of her brothers and sisters on the stage.
+
+These unfortunate people come into rooms where there are crowds of
+people about--people that it is most important that they should see, and
+owing to not seeing whom they get themselves into fearful trouble, and
+they never notice any of them. They talk to somebody opposite, and they
+can't see a third person that is standing bang between the two of them.
+
+You might fancy they wore blinkers.
+
+Then, again, their hearing is so terribly weak. It really ought to be
+seen to. People talk and chatter at the very top of their voices close
+behind them, and they never hear a word--don't know anybody's there,
+even. After it has been going on for half an hour, and the people "up
+stage" have made themselves hoarse with shouting, and somebody has been
+boisterously murdered and all the furniture upset, then the people "down
+stage" "think they hear a noise."
+
+The comic man always rows with his wife if he is married or with his
+sweetheart if he is not married. They quarrel all day long. It must be a
+trying life, you would think, but they appear to like it.
+
+How the comic man lives and supports his wife (she looks as if it wanted
+something to support her, too) and family is always a mystery to us. As
+we have said, he is not a rich man and he never seems to earn any money.
+Sometimes he keeps a shop, and in the way he manages business it must be
+an expensive thing to keep, for he never charges anybody for anything,
+he is so generous. All his customers seem to be people more or less in
+trouble, and he can't find it in his heart to ask them to pay for their
+goods under such distressing circumstances.
+
+He stuffs their basket full with twice as much as they came to buy,
+pushes their money back into their hands, and wipes away a tear.
+
+Why doesn't a comic man come and set up a grocery store in our
+neighborhood?
+
+When the shop does not prove sufficiently profitable (as under the
+above-explained method sometimes happens to be the case) the comic man's
+wife seeks to add to the income by taking in lodgers. This is a bad move
+on her part, for it always ends in the lodgers taking her in. The hero
+and heroine, who seem to have been waiting for something of the sort,
+immediately come and take possession of the whole house.
+
+Of course the comic man could not think of charging for mere board
+and lodging the man who knocked him down when they were boys together!
+Besides, was not the heroine (now the hero's wife) the sweetest and the
+blithest girl in all the village of Deepdale? (They must have been a
+gloomy band, the others!) How can any one with a human heart beneath
+his bosom suggest that people like that should pay for their rest and
+washing? The comic man is shocked at his wife for even thinking of such
+a thing, and the end of it is that Mr. and Mrs. Hero live there for the
+rest of the play rent free; coals, soap, candles, and hair-oil for the
+child being provided for them on the same terms.
+
+The hero raises vague and feeble objections to this arrangement now and
+again. He says he will not hear of such a thing, that he will stay no
+longer to be a burden upon these honest folk, but will go forth unto the
+roadside and there starve. The comic man has awful work with him, but
+wins at last and persuades the noble fellow to stop on and give the
+place another trial.
+
+When, a morning or so after witnessing one of these beautiful scenes,
+our own landlady knocks at our door and creates a disturbance over a
+paltry matter of three or four weeks' rent, and says she'll have her
+money or out we go that very day, and drifts slowly away down toward the
+kitchen, abusing us in a rising voice as she descends, then we think of
+these things and grow sad.
+
+It is the example of the people round him that makes the comic man so
+generous. Everybody is generous on the stage. They are giving away their
+purses all day long; that is the regulation "tip" on the stage--one's
+purse. The moment you hear a tale of woe, you grab it out of your
+pocket, slap it in to the woe-er's palm, grip his hand, dash away a
+tear, and exit; you don't even leave yourself a 'bus fare home. You walk
+back quickly and get another purse.
+
+Middle-class people and others on the stage who are short of purses
+have to content themselves with throwing about rolls of bank-notes and
+tipping servants with five-pound checks. Very stingy people on the stage
+have been known to be so cussed mean as to give away mere sovereigns.
+
+But they are generally only villains or lords that descend to this sort
+of thing. Respectable stage folk never offer anything less than a purse.
+
+The recipient is very grateful on receiving the purse (he never looks
+inside) and thinks that Heaven ought to reward the donor. They get a
+lot of work out of Heaven on the stage. Heaven does all the odd jobs for
+them that they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of doing for
+themselves. Heaven's chief duty on the stage is to see to the repayment
+of all those sums of money that are given or lent to the good people. It
+is generally requested to do this to the tune of a "thousand-fold"--an
+exorbitant rate when you come to think of it.
+
+Heaven is also expected to take care that the villain gets properly
+cursed, and to fill up its spare time by bringing misfortune upon the
+local landlord. It has to avenge everybody and to help all the good
+people whenever they are in trouble. And they keep it going in this
+direction.
+
+And when the hero leaves for prison Heaven has to take care of his wife
+and child till he comes out; and if this isn't a handful for it, we
+don't know what would be!
+
+Heaven on the stage is always on the side of the hero and heroine and
+against the police.
+
+Occasionally, of late years, the comic man has been a bad man, but you
+can't hate him for it. What if he does ruin the hero and rob the heroine
+and help to murder the good old man? He does it all in such a genial,
+light-hearted spirit that it is not in one's heart to feel angry
+with him. It is the way in which a thing is done that makes all the
+difference.
+
+Besides, he can always round on his pal, the serious villain, at the
+end, and that makes it all right.
+
+The comic man is not a sportsman. If he goes out shooting, we know that
+when he returns we shall hear that he has shot the dog. If he takes his
+girl out on the river he upsets her (literally we mean). The comic man
+never goes out for a day's pleasure without coming home a wreck.
+
+If he merely goes to tea with his girl at her mother's, he swallows a
+muffin and chokes himself.
+
+The comic man is not happy in his married life, nor does it seem to us
+that he goes the right way to be so. He calls his wife "his old Dutch
+clock," "the old geyser," and such like terms of endearment, and
+addresses her with such remarks as "Ah, you old cat," "You ugly old
+nutmeg grater," "You orangamatang, you!" etc., etc.
+
+Well, you know that is not the way to make things pleasant about a
+house.
+
+Still, with all his faults we like the comic man. He is not always in
+trouble and he does not make long speeches.
+
+Let us bless him.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAWYER.
+
+He is very old, and very long, and very thin. He has white hair. He
+dresses in the costume of the last generation but seven. He has bushy
+eyebrows and is clean shaven. His chin itches considerably, so that he
+has to be always scratching it. His favorite remark is "Ah!"
+
+In real life we have heard of young solicitors, of foppish solicitors,
+of short solicitors; but on the stage they are always very thin and very
+old. The youngest stage solicitor we ever remember to have seen looked
+about sixty--the oldest about a hundred and forty-five.
+
+By the bye, it is never very safe to judge people's ages on the stage by
+their personal appearance. We have known old ladies who looked seventy,
+if they were a day, turn out to be the mothers of boys of fourteen,
+while the middle-aged husband of the young wife generally gives one the
+idea of ninety.
+
+Again, what appears at first sight to be a comfortable-looking and
+eminently respectable elderly lady is often discovered to be, in
+reality, a giddy, girlish, and inexperienced young thing, the pride of
+the village or the darling of the regiment.
+
+So, too, an exceptionally stout and short-winded old gentleman, who
+looks as if he had been living too well and taking too little exercise
+for the last forty-five years, is not the heavy father, as you might
+imagine if you judged from mere external evidence, but a wild, reckless
+boy.
+
+You would not think so to look at him, but his only faults are that he
+is so young and light-headed. There is good in him, however, and he will
+no doubt be steady enough when he grows up. All the young men of the
+neighborhood worship him and the girls love him.
+
+"Here he comes," they say; "dear, dear old Jack--Jack, the darling
+boy--the headstrong youth--Jack, the leader of our juvenile
+sports--Jack, whose childish innocence wins all hearts. Three cheers for
+dancing, bright-eyed Jack!"
+
+On the other hand, ladies with the complexion of eighteen are, you learn
+as the story progresses, quite elderly women, the mothers of middle-aged
+heroes.
+
+The experienced observer of stage-land never jumps to conclusions from
+what he sees. He waits till he is told things.
+
+The stage lawyer never has any office of his own. He transacts all his
+business at his clients' houses. He will travel hundreds of miles to
+tell them the most trivial piece of legal information.
+
+It never occurs to him how much simpler it would be to write a letter.
+The item for "traveling expenses" in his bill of costs must be something
+enormous.
+
+There are two moments in the course of his client's career that the
+stage lawyer particularly enjoys. The first is when the client comes
+unexpectedly into a fortune; the second when he unexpectedly loses it.
+
+In the former case, upon learning the good news the stage lawyer at once
+leaves his business and hurries off to the other end of the kingdom
+to bear the glad tidings. He arrives at the humble domicile of the
+beneficiary in question, sends up his card, and is ushered into the
+front parlor. He enters mysteriously and sits left--client sits right.
+An ordinary, common lawyer would come to the point at once, state the
+matter in a plain, business-like way, and trust that he might have the
+pleasure of representing, etc., etc.; but such simple methods are not
+those of the stage lawyer. He looks at the client and says:
+
+"You had a father."
+
+The client starts. How on earth did this calm, thin, keen-eyed old man
+in black know that he had a father? He shuffles and stammers, but the
+quiet, impenetrable lawyer fixes his cold, glassy eye on him, and he is
+helpless. Subterfuge, he feels, is useless, and amazed, bewildered
+at the knowledge of his most private affairs possessed by his strange
+visitant, he admits the fact: he had a father.
+
+The lawyer smiles with a quiet smile of triumph and scratches his chin.
+
+"You had a mother, too, if I am informed correctly," he continues.
+
+It is idle attempting to escape this man's supernatural acuteness, and
+the client owns up to having had a mother also.
+
+From this the lawyer goes on to communicate to the client, as a great
+secret, the whole of his (the client's) history from his cradle upward,
+and also the history of his nearer relatives, and in less than half an
+hour from the old man's entrance, or say forty minutes at the outside,
+the client almost knows what the business is about.
+
+On the other occasion, when the client has lost his fortune, the
+stage lawyer is even still happier. He comes down himself to tell the
+misfortune (he would not miss the job for worlds), and he takes care to
+choose the most unpropitious moment possible for breaking the news. On
+the eldest daughter's birthday, when there is a big party on, is his
+favorite time. He comes in about midnight and tells them just as they
+are going down to supper.
+
+He has no idea of business hours, has the stage lawyer--to make the
+thing as unpleasant as possible seems to be his only anxiety.
+
+If he cannot work it for a birthday, then he waits till there's a
+wedding on, and gets up early in the morning on purpose to run down and
+spoil the show. To enter among a crowd of happy, joyous fellow-creatures
+and leave them utterly crushed and miserable is the stage lawyer's
+hobby.
+
+The stage lawyer is a very talkative gentleman. He regards the telling
+of his client's most private affairs to every stranger that he meets
+as part of his professional duties. A good gossip with a few chance
+acquaintances about the family secrets of his employers is food and
+drink for the stage lawyer.
+
+They all go about telling their own and their friends' secrets to
+perfect strangers on the stage. Whenever two people have five minutes to
+spare on the stage they tell each other the story of their lives. "Sit
+down and I will tell you the story of my life" is the stage equivalent
+for the "Come and have a drink" of the outside world.
+
+The good stage lawyer has generally nursed the heroine on his knee when
+a baby (when she was a baby, we mean)--when she was only so high. It
+seems to have been a part of his professional duties. The good stage
+lawyer also kisses all the pretty girls in the play and is expected
+to chuck the housemaid under the chin. It is good to be a good stage
+lawyer.
+
+The good stage lawyer also wipes away a tear when sad things happen; and
+he turns away to do this and blows his nose, and says he thinks he has
+a fly in his eye. This touching trait in his character is always held in
+great esteem by the audience and is much applauded.
+
+The good stage lawyer is never by any chance a married man. (Few good
+men are, so we gather from our married lady friends.) He loved in early
+life the heroine's mother. That "sainted woman" (tear and nose business)
+died and is now among the angels--the gentleman who did marry her, by
+the bye, is not quite so sure about this latter point, but the lawyer is
+fixed on the idea.
+
+In stage literature of a frivolous nature the lawyer is a very different
+individual. In comedy he is young, he possesses chambers, and he is
+married (there is no doubt about this latter fact); and his wife and his
+mother-in-law spend most of the day in his office and make the dull old
+place quite lively for him.
+
+He only has one client. She is a nice lady and affable, but her
+antecedents are doubtful, and she seems to be no better than she ought
+to be--possibly worse. But anyhow she is the sole business that the poor
+fellow has--is, in fact, his only source of income, and might, one would
+think, under such circumstances be accorded a welcome by his family. But
+his wife and his mother-in-law, on the contrary, take a violent dislike
+to her, and the lawyer has to put her in the coal-scuttle or lock her
+up in the safe whenever he hears either of these female relatives of his
+coming up the stairs.
+
+We should not care to be the client of a farcical comedy stage lawyer.
+Legal transactions are trying to the nerves under the most favorable
+circumstances; conducted by a farcical stage lawyer, the business would
+be too exciting for us.
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENTURESS.
+
+She sits on a table and smokes a cigarette. A cigarette on the stage is
+always the badge of infamy.
+
+In real life the cigarette is usually the hall-mark of the particularly
+mild and harmless individual. It is the dissipation of the Y.M.C.A.; the
+innocent joy of the pure-hearted boy long ere the demoralizing influence
+of our vaunted civilization has dragged him down into the depths of the
+short clay.
+
+But behind the cigarette on the stage lurks ever black-hearted villainy
+and abandoned womanhood.
+
+The adventuress is generally of foreign extraction. They do not make bad
+women in England--the article is entirely of continental manufacture
+and has to be imported. She speaks English with a charming little French
+accent, and she makes up for this by speaking French with a good sound
+English one.
+
+She seems a smart business woman, and she would probably get on very
+well if it were not for her friends and relations. Friends and relations
+are a trying class of people even in real life, as we all know, but
+the friends and relations of the stage adventuress are a particularly
+irritating lot. They never leave her; never does she get a day or an
+hour off from them. Wherever she goes, there the whole tribe goes with
+her.
+
+They all go with her in a body when she calls on her young man, and it
+is as much as she can do to persuade them to go into the next room even
+for five minutes, and give her a chance. When she is married they come
+and live with her.
+
+They know her dreadful secret and it keeps them in comfort for years.
+Knowing somebody's secret seems, on the stage, to be one of the most
+profitable and least exhausting professions going.
+
+She is fond of married life, is the adventuress, and she goes in for it
+pretty extensively. She has husbands all over the globe, most of them
+in prison, but they escape and turn up in the last act and spoil all
+the poor girl's plans. That is so like husbands--no consideration, no
+thought for their poor wives. They are not a prepossessing lot, either,
+those early husbands of hers. What she could have seen in them to induce
+her to marry them is indeed a mystery.
+
+The adventuress dresses magnificently. Where she gets the money from we
+never could understand, for she and her companions are always more or
+less complaining of being "stone broke." Dressmakers must be a trusting
+people where she comes from.
+
+The adventuress is like the proverbial cat as regards the number of
+lives she is possessed of. You never know when she is really dead. Most
+people like to die once and have done with it, but the adventuress,
+after once or twice trying it, seems to get quite to like it, and goes
+on giving way to it, and then it grows upon her until she can't help
+herself, and it becomes a sort of craving with her.
+
+This habit of hers is, however, a very trying one for her friends and
+husbands--it makes things so uncertain. Something ought to be done to
+break her of it. Her husbands, on hearing that she is dead, go into
+raptures and rush off and marry other people, and then just as they
+are starting off on their new honeymoon up she crops again, as fresh as
+paint. It is really most annoying.
+
+For ourselves, were we the husband of a stage adventuress we should
+never, after what we have seen of the species, feel quite justified in
+believing her to be dead unless we had killed and buried her ourselves;
+and even then we should be more easy in our minds if we could arrange to
+sit on her grave for a week or so afterward. These women are so artful!
+
+But it is not only the adventuress who will persist in coming to life
+again every time she is slaughtered. They all do it on the stage. They
+are all so unreliable in this respect. It must be most disheartening to
+the murderers.
+
+And then, again, it is something extraordinary, when you come to think
+of it, what a tremendous amount of killing some of them can stand and
+still come up smiling in the next act, not a penny the worse for it.
+They get stabbed, and shot, and thrown over precipices thousands of feet
+high and, bless you, it does them good--it is like a tonic to them.
+
+As for the young man that is coming home to see his girl, you simply
+can't kill him. Achilles was a summer rose compared with him. Nature and
+mankind have not sufficient materials in hand as yet to kill that
+man. Science has but the strength of a puling babe against his
+invulnerability. You can waste your time on earthquakes and shipwrecks,
+volcanic eruptions, floods, explosions, railway accidents, and such like
+sort of things, if you are foolish enough to do so; but it is no good
+your imagining that anything of the kind can hurt him, because it can't.
+
+There will be thousands of people killed, thousands in each instance,
+but one human being will always escape, and that one human being will be
+the stage young man who is coming home to see his girl.
+
+He is forever being reported as dead, but it always turns out to be
+another fellow who was like him or who had on his (the young man's) hat.
+He is bound to be out of it, whoever else may be in.
+
+"If I had been at my post that day," he explains to his sobbing mother,
+"I should have been blown up, but the Providence that watches over good
+men had ordained that I should be laying blind drunk in Blogg's saloon
+at the time the explosion took place, and so the other engineer, who had
+been doing my work when it was his turn to be off, was killed along with
+the whole of the crew."
+
+"Ah, thank Heaven, thank Heaven for that!" ejaculates the pious old
+lady, and the comic man is so overcome with devout joy that he has to
+relieve his overstrained heart by drawing his young woman on one side
+and grossly insulting her.
+
+All attempts to kill this young man ought really to be given up now. The
+job has been tried over and over again by villains and bad people of all
+kinds, but no one has ever succeeded. There has been an amount of energy
+and ingenuity expended in seeking to lay up that one man which, properly
+utilized, might have finished off ten million ordinary mortals. It is
+sad to think of so much wasted effort.
+
+He, the young man coming home to see his girl, need never take an
+insurance ticket or even buy a _Tit Bits_. It would be needless
+expenditure in his case.
+
+On the other hand, and to make matters equal, as it were, there are some
+stage people so delicate that it is next door to impossible to keep them
+alive.
+
+The inconvenient husband is a most pathetic example of this. Medical
+science is powerless to save that man when the last act comes round;
+indeed, we doubt whether medical science, in its present state of
+development, could even tell what is the matter with him or why he dies
+at all. He looks healthy and robust enough and nobody touches him, yet
+down he drops, without a word of warning, stone-dead, in the middle of
+the floor--he always dies in the middle of the floor. Some folks like
+to die in bed, but stage people don't. They like to die on the floor. We
+all have our different tastes.
+
+The adventuress herself is another person who dies with remarkable ease.
+We suppose in her case it is being so used to it that makes her so quick
+and clever at it. There is no lingering illness and doctors' bills and
+upsetting of the whole household arrangements about her method. One walk
+round the stage and the thing is done.
+
+All bad characters die quickly on the stage. Good characters take a long
+time over it, and have a sofa down in the drawing-room to do it on, and
+have sobbing relatives and good old doctors fooling around them, and can
+smile and forgive everybody. Bad stage characters have to do the whole
+job, dying speech and all, in about ten seconds, and do it with
+all their clothes on into the bargain, which must make it most
+uncomfortable.
+
+It is repentance that kills off the bad people in plays. They always
+repent, and the moment they repent they die. Repentance on the stage
+seems to be one of the most dangerous things a man can be taken with.
+Our advice to stage wicked people would undoubtedly be, "Never repent.
+If you value your life, don't repent. It always means sudden death!"
+
+To return to our adventuress. She is by no means a bad woman. There is
+much good in her. This is more than proved by the fact that she learns
+to love the hero before she dies; for no one but a really good woman
+capable of extraordinary patience and gentleness could ever, we are
+convinced, grow to feel any other sentiment for that irritating ass,
+than a desire to throw bricks at him.
+
+The stage adventuress would be a much better woman, too, if it were not
+for the heroine. The adventuress makes the most complete arrangements
+for being noble and self-sacrificing--that is, for going away and never
+coming back, and is just about to carry them out, when the heroine, who
+has a perfect genius for being in the wrong place at the right time,
+comes in and spoils it all. No stage adventuress can be good while the
+heroine is about. The sight of the heroine rouses every bad feeling in
+her breast.
+
+We can sympathize with her in this respect. The heroine often affects
+ourselves in precisely the same way.
+
+There is a good deal to be said in favor of the adventuress. True, she
+possesses rather too much sarcasm and repartee to make things quite
+agreeable round the domestic hearth, and when she has got all her
+clothes on there is not much room left in the place for anybody else;
+but taken on the whole she is decidedly attractive. She has grit and
+go in her. She is alive. She can do something to help herself besides
+calling for "George."
+
+She has not got a stage child--if she ever had one, she has left it on
+somebody else's doorstep which, presuming there was no water handy to
+drown it in, seems to be about the most sensible thing she could have
+done with it. She is not oppressively good.
+
+She never wants to be "unhanded" or "let to pass."
+
+She is not always being shocked or insulted by people telling her that
+they love her; she does not seem to mind it if they do. She is not
+always fainting, and crying, and sobbing, and wailing, and moaning, like
+the good people in the play are.
+
+Oh, they do have an unhappy time of it--the good people in plays! Then
+she is the only person in the piece who can sit on the comic man.
+
+We sometimes think it would be a fortunate thing--for him--if they
+allowed her to marry and settle down quietly with the hero. She might
+make a man of him in time.
+
+
+
+
+THE SERVANT-GIRL.
+
+There are two types of servant-girl to be met with on the stage. This is
+an unusual allowance for one profession.
+
+There is the lodging-house slavey. She has a good heart and a
+smutty face and is always dressed according to the latest fashion in
+scarecrows. Her leading occupation is the cleaning of boots. She cleans
+boots all over the house, at all hours of the day. She comes and
+sits down on the hero's breakfast-table and cleans them over the poor
+fellow's food. She comes into the drawing-room cleaning boots.
+
+She has her own method of cleaning them, too. She rubs off the mud, puts
+on the blacking, and polishes up all with the same brush. They take an
+enormous amount of polishing. She seems to do nothing else all day long
+but walk about shining one boot, and she breathes on it and rubs it
+till you wonder there is any leather left, yet it never seems to get any
+brighter, nor, indeed, can you expect it to, for when you look close you
+see it is a patent-leather boot that she has been throwing herself away
+upon all this time.
+
+Somebody has been having a lark with the poor girl.
+
+The lodging-house slavey brushes her hair with the boot brush and blacks
+the end of her nose with it.
+
+We were acquainted with a lodging-house slavey once--a real one, we
+mean. She was the handmaiden at a house in Bloomsbury where we once hung
+out. She was untidy in her dress, it is true, but she had not quite that
+castaway and gone-to-sleep-in-a-dust-bin appearance that we, an earnest
+student of the drama, felt she ought to present, and we questioned her
+one day on the subject.
+
+"How is it, Sophronia," we said, "that you distantly resemble a human
+being instead of giving one the idea of an animated rag-shop? Don't you
+ever polish your nose with the blacking-brush, or rub coal into your
+head, or wash your face in treacle, or put skewers into your hair, or
+anything of that sort, like they do on the stage?"
+
+She said: "Lord love you, what should I want to go and be a bally idiot
+like that for?"
+
+And we have not liked to put the question elsewhere since then.
+
+The other type of servant-girl on the stage--the villa servant-girl--is
+a very different personage. She is a fetching little thing, dresses
+bewitchingly, and is always clean. Her duties are to dust the legs of
+the chairs in the drawing-room. That is the only work she ever has to
+do, but it must be confessed she does that thoroughly. She never comes
+into the room without dusting the legs of these chairs, and she dusts
+them again before she goes out.
+
+If anything ought to be free from dust in a stage house, it should be
+the legs of the drawing-room chairs.
+
+She is going to marry the man-servant, is the stage servant-girl, as
+soon as they have saved up sufficient out of their wages to buy a hotel.
+They think they will like to keep a hotel. They don't understand a bit
+about the business, which we believe is a complicated one, but this does
+not trouble them in the least.
+
+They quarrel a good deal over their love-making, do the stage
+servant-girl and her young man, and they always come into the
+drawing-room to do it. They have got the kitchen, and there is the
+garden (with a fountain and mountains in the background--you can see
+it through the window), but no! no place in or about the house is good
+enough for them to quarrel in except the drawing-room. They quarrel
+there so vigorously that it even interferes with the dusting of the
+chair-legs.
+
+She ought not to be long in saving up sufficient to marry on, for
+the generosity of people on the stage to the servants there makes one
+seriously consider the advisability of ignoring the unremunerative
+professions of ordinary life and starting a new and more promising
+career as a stage servant.
+
+No one ever dreams of tipping the stage servant with less than a
+sovereign when they ask her if her mistress is at home or give her a
+letter to post, and there is quite a rush at the end of the piece to
+stuff five-pound notes into her hand. The good old man gives her ten.
+
+The stage servant is very impudent to her mistress, and the master--he
+falls in love with her and it does upset the house so.
+
+Sometimes the servant-girl is good and faithful, and then she is Irish.
+All good servant-girls on the stage are Irish.
+
+All the male visitors are expected to kiss the stage servant-girl when
+they come into the house, and to dig her in the ribs and to say: "Do you
+know, Jane, I think you're an uncommonly nice girl--click." They always
+say this, and she likes it.
+
+Many years ago, when we were young, we thought we would see if things
+were the same off the stage, and the next time we called at a certain
+friend's house we tried this business on.
+
+She wasn't quite so dazzlingly beautiful as they are on the stage, but
+we passed that. She showed us up into the drawing-room, and then said
+she would go and tell her mistress we were there.
+
+We felt this was the time to begin. We skipped between her and the door.
+We held our hat in front of us, cocked our head on one side, and said:
+"Don't go! don't go!"
+
+The girl seemed alarmed. We began to get a little nervous ourselves, but
+we had begun it and we meant to go through with it.
+
+We said, "Do you know, Jane" (her name wasn't Jane, but that wasn't our
+fault), "do you know, Jane, I think you're an uncommonly nice girl,"
+and we said "click," and dug her in the ribs with our elbow, and then
+chucked her under the chin. The whole thing seemed to fall flat. There
+was nobody there to laugh or applaud. We wished we hadn't done it. It
+seemed stupid when you came to think of it. We began to feel frightened.
+The business wasn't going as we expected; but we screwed up our courage
+and went on.
+
+We put on the customary expression of comic imbecility and beckoned the
+girl to us. We have never seen this fail on the stage.
+
+But this girl seemed made wrong. She got behind the sofa and screamed
+"Help!"
+
+We have never known them to do this on the stage, and it threw us out in
+our plans. We did not know exactly what to do. We regretted that we
+had ever begun this job and heartily wished ourselves out of it. But it
+appeared foolish to pause then, when we were more than half-way through,
+and we made a rush to get it over.
+
+We chivvied the girl round the sofa and caught her near the door and
+kissed her. She scratched our face, yelled police, murder, and fire, and
+fled from the room.
+
+Our friend came in almost immediately. He said:
+
+"I say, J., old man, are you drunk?"
+
+We told him no, that we were only a student of the drama. His wife then
+entered in a towering passion. She didn't ask us if we were drunk. She
+said:
+
+"How dare you come here in this state!"
+
+We endeavored unsuccessfully to induce her to believe that we were
+sober, and we explained that our course of conduct was what was always
+pursued on the stage.
+
+She said she didn't care what was done on the stage, it wasn't going
+to be pursued in her house; and that if her husband's friends couldn't
+behave as gentlemen they had better stop away.
+
+The following morning we received a letter from a firm of solicitors
+in Lincoln's Inn with reference, so they put it, to the brutal and
+unprovoked assault committed by us on the previous afternoon upon the
+person of their client, Miss Matilda Hemmings. The letter stated that
+we had punched Miss Hemmings in the side, struck her under the chin, and
+afterward, seizing her as she was leaving the room, proceeded to commit
+a gross assault, into the particulars of which it was needless for them
+to enter at greater length.
+
+It added that if we were prepared to render an ample written apology
+and to pay 50 pounds compensation, they would advise their client,
+Miss Matilda Hemmings, to allow the matter to drop; otherwise criminal
+proceedings would at once be commenced against us.
+
+We took the letter to our own solicitors and explained the circumstances
+to them. They said it seemed to be a very sad case, but advised us to
+pay the 50 pounds, and we borrowed the money and did so.
+
+Since then we have lost faith, somehow, in the British drama as a guide
+to the conduct of life.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHILD.
+
+It is nice and quiet and it talks prettily.
+
+We have come across real infants now and then in the course of visits to
+married friends; they have been brought to us from outlying parts of the
+house and introduced to us for our edification; and we have found them
+gritty and sticky. Their boots have usually been muddy, and they have
+wiped them up against our new trousers. And their hair has suggested the
+idea that they have been standing on their heads in the dust-bin.
+
+And they have talked to us--but not prettily, not at all--rather rude we
+should call it.
+
+But the stage child is very different. It is clean and tidy. You can
+touch it anywhere and nothing comes off. Its face glows with soap and
+water. From the appearance of its hands it is evident that mud-pies and
+tar are joys unknown to it. As for its hair, there is something uncanny
+about its smoothness and respectability. Even its boot-laces are done
+up.
+
+We have never seen anything like the stage child outside a theater
+excepting one--that was on the pavement in front of a tailor's shop
+in Tottenham Court Road. He stood on a bit of round wood, and it was
+fifteen and nine, his style.
+
+We thought in our ignorance prior to this that there could not be
+anything in the world like the stage child, but you see we were
+mistaken.
+
+The stage child is affectionate to its parents and its nurse and is
+respectful in its demeanor toward those whom Providence has placed in
+authority over it; and so far it is certainly much to be preferred to
+the real article. It speaks of its male and female progenitors as
+"dear, dear papa" and "dear, dear mamma," and it refers to its nurse as
+"darling nursey." We are connected with a youthful child ourselves--a
+real one--a nephew. He alludes to his father (when his father is
+not present) as "the old man," and always calls the nurse "old
+nut-crackers." Why cannot they make real children who say "dear, dear
+mamma" and "dear, dear papa?"
+
+The stage child is much superior to the live infant in every way. The
+stage child does not go rampaging about a house and screeching and
+yelling till nobody knows whether they are on their heads or their
+heels.
+
+A stage child does not get up at five o'clock in the morning to practice
+playing on a penny whistle. A stage child never wants a bicycle and
+drives you mad about it. A stage child does not ask twenty complicated
+questions a minute about things that you don't understand, and then
+wind up by asking why you don't seem to know anything, and why wouldn't
+anybody teach you anything when you were a little boy.
+
+The stage child does not wear a hole in the seat of its knickerbockers
+and have to have a patch let in. The stage child comes downstairs on its
+feet.
+
+The stage child never brings home six other children to play at horses
+in the front garden, and then wants to know if they can all come in to
+tea. The stage child never has the wooping-cough, and the measles, and
+every other disease that it can lay its hands on, and be laid up with
+them one after the other and turn the house upside down.
+
+The stage child's department in the scheme of life is to harrow up its
+mother's feelings by ill-timed and uncalled-for questions about its
+father. It always wants to know, before a roomful of people, where "dear
+papa" is, and why he has left dear mamma; when, as all the guests know,
+the poor man is doing his two years' hard or waiting to be hanged. It
+makes everybody so uncomfortable.
+
+It is always harrowing up somebody--the stage child; it really ought
+not to be left about as it is. When it has done upsetting its mother it
+fishes out some broken-hearted maid, who has just been cruelly severed
+forever from her lover, and asks her in a high falsetto voice why she
+doesn't get married, and prattles to her about love, and domestic
+bliss, and young men, and any other subject it can think of particularly
+calculated to lacerate the poor girl's heart until her brain nearly
+gives way.
+
+After that it runs amuck up and down the whole play and makes everybody
+sit up all round. It asks eminently respectable old maids if they
+wouldn't like to have a baby; and it wants to know why bald-headed old
+men have left off wearing hair, and why other old gentlemen have red
+noses and if they were always that color.
+
+In some plays it so happens that the less said about the origin and
+source of the stage child the better; and in such cases nothing will
+appear so important to that contrary brat as to know, in the middle of
+an evening-party, who its father was!
+
+Everybody loves the stage child. They catch it up in their bosoms every
+other minute and weep over it. They take it in turns to do this.
+
+Nobody--on the stage, we mean--ever has enough of the stage child.
+Nobody ever tells the stage child to "shut up" or to "get out of this."
+Nobody ever clumps the stage child over the head.
+
+When the real child goes to the theater it must notice these things and
+wish it were a stage child.
+
+The stage child is much admired by the audience. Its pathos makes them
+weep; its tragedy thrills them; its declamation--as for instance when it
+takes the center of the stage and says it will kill the wicked man, and
+the police, and everybody who hurts its mar--stirs them like a trumpet
+note; and its light comedy is generally held to be the most truly
+humorous thing in the whole range of dramatic art.
+
+But there are some people so strangely constituted that they do not
+appreciate the stage child; they do not comprehend its uses; they do not
+understand its beauties. We should not be angry with them. We should the
+rather pity them.
+
+We ourselves had a friend once who suffered from this misfortune. He was
+a married man, and Providence had been very gracious, very good to him:
+he had been blessed with eleven children, and they were all growing up
+well and strong.
+
+The "baby" was eleven weeks old, and then came the twins, who were
+getting on for fifteen months and were cutting their double teeth
+nicely. The youngest girl was three; there were five boys aged seven,
+eight, nine, ten, and twelve respectively--good enough lads, but--well,
+there, boys will be boys, you know; we were just the same ourselves when
+we were young. The two eldest were both very pleasant girls, as their
+mother said; the only pity was that they would quarrel so with each
+other.
+
+We never knew a healthier set of boys and girls. They were so full of
+energy and dash.
+
+Our friend was very much out of sorts one evening when we called on him.
+It was holiday-time and wet weather. He had been at home all day, and so
+had all the children. He was telling his wife when we entered the room
+that if the holidays were to last much longer and those twins did not
+hurry up and get their teeth quickly, he should have to go away and join
+the County Council. He could not stand the racket.
+
+His wife said she could not see what he had to complain of. She was sure
+better-hearted children no man could have.
+
+Our friend said he didn't care a straw about their hearts. It was their
+legs and arms and lungs that were driving him crazy.
+
+He also said that he would go out with us and get away from it for a
+bit, or he should go mad.
+
+He proposed a theater, and we accordingly made our way toward the
+Strand. Our friend, in closing the door behind him, said he could not
+tell us what a relief it was to get away from those children. He said he
+loved children very much indeed, but that it was a mistake to have too
+much of anything, however much you liked it, and that he had come to the
+conclusion that twenty-two hours a day of them was enough for any one.
+
+He said he did not want to see another child or hear another child until
+he got home. He wanted to forget that there were such things as children
+in the world.
+
+We got up to the Strand and dropped into the first theater we came to.
+The curtain went up, and on the stage was a small child standing in its
+nightshirt and screaming for its mother.
+
+Our friend looked, said one word and bolted, and we followed.
+
+We went a little further and dropped into another theater.
+
+Here there were two children on the stage. Some grown-up people were
+standing round them listening, in respectful attitudes, while the
+children talked. They appeared to be lecturing about something.
+
+Again we fled, swearing, and made our way to a third theater. They
+were all children there. It was somebody or other's Children's Company
+performing an opera, or pantomime, or something of that sort.
+
+Our friend said he would not venture into another theater. He said he
+had heard there were places called music-halls, and he begged us to take
+him to one of these and not to tell his wife.
+
+We inquired of a policeman and found that there really were such places,
+and we took him into one.
+
+The first thing we saw were two little boys doing tricks on a horizontal
+bar.
+
+Our friend was about to repeat his customary programme of flying and
+cursing, but we restrained him. We assured him that he would really see
+a grown-up person if he waited a bit, so he sat out the boys and also
+their little sister on a bicycle and waited for the next item.
+
+It turned out to be an infant phenomenon who sang and danced in fourteen
+different costumes, and we once more fled.
+
+Our friend said he could not go home in the state he was then; he felt
+sure he should kill the twins if he did. He pondered for awhile, and
+then he thought he would go and hear some music. He said he thought a
+little music would soothe and ennoble him--make him feel more like a
+Christian than he did at that precise moment.
+
+We were near St. James' Hall, so we went in there.
+
+The hall was densely crowded, and we had great difficulty in forcing our
+way to our seats. We reached them at length, and then turned our eyes
+toward the orchestra.
+
+"The marvelous boy pianist--only ten years old!" was giving a recital.
+
+Then our friend rose and said he thought he would give it up and go
+home.
+
+We asked him if he would like to try any other place of amusement, but
+he said "No." He said that when you came to think of it, it seemed a
+waste of money for a man with eleven children of his own to go about to
+places of entertainment nowadays.
+
+
+
+
+THE COMIC LOVERS.
+
+Oh, they are funny! The comic lovers' mission in life is to serve as
+a sort of "relief" to the misery caused the audience by the other
+characters in the play; and all that is wanted now is something that
+will be a relief to the comic lovers.
+
+They have nothing to do with the play, but they come on immediately
+after anything very sad has happened and make love. This is why we watch
+sad scenes on the stage with such patience. We are not eager for them
+to be got over. Maybe they are very uninteresting scenes, as well as sad
+ones, and they make us yawn; but we have no desire to see them hurried
+through. The longer they take the better pleased we are: we know that
+when they are finished the comic lovers will come on.
+
+They are always very rude to each other, the comic lovers. Everybody is
+more or less rude and insulting to every body else on the stage; they
+call it repartee there! We tried the effect of a little stage "repartee"
+once upon some people in real life, and we wished we hadn't afterward.
+It was too subtle for them. They summoned us before a magistrate for
+"using language calculated to cause a breach of the peace." We were
+fined 2 pounds and costs!
+
+They are more lenient to "wit and humor" on the stage, and know how
+to encourage the art of vituperation. But the comic lovers carry the
+practice almost to excess. They are more than rude--they are abusive.
+They insult each other from morning to night. What their married life
+will be like we shudder to think!
+
+In the various slanging matches and bullyragging competitions which form
+their courtship it is always the maiden that is most successful.
+Against her merry flow of invective and her girlish wealth of offensive
+personalities the insolence and abuse of her boyish adorer cannot stand
+for one moment.
+
+To give an idea of how the comic lovers woo, we perhaps cannot do better
+than subjoin the following brief example:
+
+     _SCENE:  Main thoroughfare in populous district of London.  Time:
+     Noon.  Not a soul to be seen anywhere._
+
+     _Enter comic loveress R., walking in the middle of the road._
+
+     _Enter comic lover L., also walking in the middle of the road._
+
+     _They neither see the other until they bump against each other in
+     the center._
+
+HE. Why, Jane! Who'd a' thought o' meeting you here!
+
+SHE. You evidently didn't--stoopid!
+
+HE. Halloo! got out o' bed the wrong side again? I say, Jane, if you go
+on like that you'll never get a man to marry you.
+
+SHE. So I thought when I engaged myself to you.
+
+HE. Oh! come, Jane, don't be hard.
+
+SHE. Well, one of us must be hard. You're soft enough.
+
+HE. Yes, I shouldn't want to marry you if I weren't. Ha! ha! ha!
+
+SHE. Oh, you gibbering idiot! (_Said archly._)
+
+HE. So glad I am. We shall make a capital match (_attempts to kiss
+her_).
+
+SHE (_slipping away_). Yes, and you'll find I'm a match that can strike
+(_fetches him a violent blow over the side if the head_).
+
+HE (_holding his jaw--in a literal sense, we mean_). I can't help
+feeling smitten by her.
+
+SHE. Yes, I'm a bit of a spanker, ain't I?
+
+HE. Spanker. I call you a regular stunner. You've nearly made me silly.
+
+SHE (_laughing playfully_). No, nature did that for you, Joe, long ago.
+
+HE. Ah, well, you've made me smart enough now, you boss-eyed old cow,
+you!
+
+SHE. Cow! am I? Ah, I suppose that's what makes me so fond of a calf,
+you German sausage on legs! You--
+
+HE. Go along. Your mother brought you up on sour milk.
+
+SHE. Yah! They weaned you on thistles, didn't they?
+
+And so on, with such like badinage do they hang about in the middle of
+that road, showering derision and contumely upon each other for full ten
+minutes, when, with one culminating burst of mutual abuse, they go off
+together fighting and the street is left once more deserted.
+
+It is very curious, by the bye, how deserted all public places become
+whenever a stage character is about. It would seem as though ordinary
+citizens sought to avoid them. We have known a couple of stage villains
+to have Waterloo Bridge, Lancaster Place, and a bit of the Strand
+entirely to themselves for nearly a quarter of an hour on a summer's
+afternoon while they plotted a most diabolical outrage.
+
+As for Trafalgar Square, the hero always chooses that spot when he wants
+to get away from the busy crowd and commune in solitude with his own
+bitter thoughts; and the good old lawyer leaves his office and goes
+there to discuss any very delicate business over which he particularly
+does not wish to be disturbed.
+
+And they all make speeches there to an extent sufficient to have turned
+the hair of the late lamented Sir Charles Warren White with horror. But
+it is all right, because there is nobody near to hear them. As far as
+the eye can reach, not a living thing is to be seen. Northumberland
+Avenue, the Strand, and St. Martin's Lane are simply a wilderness.
+The only sign of life about is a 'bus at the top of Whitehall, and it
+appears to be blocked.
+
+How it has managed to get blocked we cannot say. It has the whole road
+to itself, and is, in fact, itself the only traffic for miles round. Yet
+there it sticks for hours. The police make no attempt to move it on and
+the passengers seem quite contented.
+
+The Thames Embankment is an even still more lonesome and desolate part.
+Wounded (stage) spirits fly from the haunts of men and, leaving the
+hard, cold world far, far behind them, go and die in peace on the Thames
+Embankment. And other wanderers, finding their skeletons afterward, bury
+them there and put up rude crosses over the graves to mark the spot.
+
+The comic lovers are often very young, and when people on the stage are
+young they _are_ young. He is supposed to be about sixteen and she is
+fifteen. But they both talk as if they were not more than seven.
+
+In real life "boys" of sixteen know a thing or two, we have generally
+found. The average "boy" of sixteen nowadays usually smokes cavendish
+and does a little on the Stock Exchange or makes a book; and as for
+love! he has quite got over it by that age. On the stage, however, the
+new-born babe is not in it for innocence with the boy lover of sixteen.
+
+So, too, with the maiden. Most girls of fifteen off the stage, so our
+experience goes, know as much as there is any actual necessity for them
+to know, Mr. Gilbert notwithstanding; but when we see a young lady of
+fifteen on the stage we wonder where her cradle is.
+
+The comic lovers do not have the facilities for love-making that the
+hero and heroine do. The hero and heroine have big rooms to make love
+in, with a fire and plenty of easy-chairs, so that they can sit about
+in picturesque attitudes and do it comfortably. Or if they want to do
+it out of doors they have a ruined abbey, with a big stone seat in the
+center, and moonlight.
+
+The comic lovers, on the other hand, have to do it standing up all the
+time, in busy streets, or in cheerless-looking and curiously narrow
+rooms in which there is no furniture whatever and no fire.
+
+And there is always a tremendous row going on in the house when the
+comic lovers are making love. Somebody always seems to be putting up
+pictures in the next room, and putting them up boisterously, too, so
+that the comic lovers have to shout at each other.
+
+
+
+
+THE PEASANTS.
+
+They are so clean. We have seen peasantry off the stage, and it
+has presented an untidy--occasionally a disreputable and
+unwashed--appearance; but the stage peasant seems to spend all his wages
+on soap and hair-oil.
+
+They are always round the corner--or rather round the two corners--and
+they come on in a couple of streams and meet in the center; and when
+they are in their proper position they smile.
+
+There is nothing like the stage peasants' smile in this world--nothing
+so perfectly inane, so calmly imbecile.
+
+They are so happy. They don't look it, but we know they are because they
+say so. If you don't believe them, they dance three steps to the right
+and three steps to the left back again. They can't help it. It is
+because they are so happy.
+
+When they are more than usually rollicking they stand in a semicircle,
+with their hands on each other's shoulders, and sway from side to side,
+trying to make themselves sick. But this is only when they are simply
+bursting with joy.
+
+Stage peasants never have any work to do.
+
+Sometimes we see them going to work, sometimes coming home from work,
+but nobody has ever seen them actually at work. They could not afford to
+work--it would spoil their clothes.
+
+They are very sympathetic, are stage peasants. They never seem to have
+any affairs of their own to think about, but they make up for this by
+taking a three-hundred-horse-power interest in things in which they have
+no earthly concern.
+
+What particularly rouses them is the heroine's love affairs. They could
+listen to them all day.
+
+They yearn to hear what she said to him and to be told what he replied
+to her, and they repeat it to each other.
+
+In our own love-sick days we often used to go and relate to various
+people all the touching conversations that took place between our
+lady-love and ourselves; but our friends never seemed to get excited
+over it. On the contrary, a casual observer might even have been led
+to the idea that they were bored by our recital. And they had trains to
+catch and men to meet before we had got a quarter through the job.
+
+Ah, how often in those days have we yearned for the sympathy of a stage
+peasantry, who would have crowded round us, eager not to miss one word
+of the thrilling narrative, who would have rejoiced with us with an
+encouraging laugh, and have condoled with us with a grieved "Oh," and
+who would have gone off, when we had had enough of them, singing about
+it.
+
+By the way, this is a very beautiful trait in the character of the stage
+peasantry, their prompt and unquestioning compliance with the slightest
+wish of any of the principals.
+
+"Leave me, friends," says the heroine, beginning to make preparations
+for weeping, and before she can turn round they are clean gone--one
+lot to the right, evidently making for the back entrance of the
+public-house, and the other half to the left, where they visibly hide
+themselves behind the pump and wait till somebody else wants them.
+
+The stage peasantry do not talk much, their strong point being to
+listen. When they cannot get any more information about the state of the
+heroine's heart, they like to be told long and complicated stories about
+wrongs done years ago to people that they never heard of. They seem to
+be able to grasp and understand these stories with ease. This makes the
+audience envious of them.
+
+When the stage peasantry do talk, however, they soon make up for lost
+time. They start off all together with a suddenness that nearly knocks
+you over.
+
+They all talk. Nobody listens. Watch any two of them. They are both
+talking as hard as they can go. They have been listening quite enough
+to other people: you can't expect them to listen to each other. But the
+conversation under such conditions must be very trying.
+
+And then they flirt so sweetly! so idyllicly!
+
+It has been our privilege to see real peasantry flirt, and it has always
+struck us as a singularly solid and substantial affair--makes one think,
+somehow, of a steam-roller flirting with a cow--but on the stage it
+is so sylph-like. She has short skirts, and her stockings are so much
+tidier and better fitting than these things are in real peasant life,
+and she is arch and coy. She turns away from him and laughs--such
+a silvery laugh. And he is ruddy and curly haired and has on such a
+beautiful waistcoat! how can she help but love him? And he is so tender
+and devoted and holds her by the waist; and she slips round and comes up
+the other side. Oh, it is so bewitching!
+
+The stage peasantry like to do their love-making as much in public as
+possible. Some people fancy a place all to themselves for this sort
+of thing--where nobody else is about. We ourselves do. But the stage
+peasant is more sociably inclined. Give him the village green, just
+outside the public-house, or the square on market-day to do his spooning
+in.
+
+They are very faithful, are stage peasants. No jilting, no fickleness,
+no breach of promise. If the gentleman in pink walks out with the lady
+in blue in the first act, pink and blue will be married in the end. He
+sticks to her all through and she sticks to him.
+
+Girls in yellow may come and go, girls in green may laugh and dance--the
+gentleman in pink heeds them not. Blue is his color, and he never leaves
+it. He stands beside it, he sits beside it. He drinks with her, he
+smiles with her, he laughs with her, he dances with her, he comes on
+with her, he goes off with her.
+
+When the time comes for talking he talks to her and only her, and she
+talks to him and only him. Thus there is no jealousy, no quarreling. But
+we should prefer an occasional change ourselves.
+
+There are no married people in stage villages and no children
+(consequently, of course--happy village! oh, to discover it and spend a
+month there!). There are just the same number of men as there are women
+in all stage villages, and they are all about the same age and each
+young man loves some young woman. But they never marry.
+
+They talk a lot about it, but they never do it. The artful beggars! They
+see too much what it's like among the principals.
+
+The stage peasant is fond of drinking, and when he drinks he likes to
+let you know he is drinking. None of your quiet half-pint inside the
+bar for him. He likes to come out in the street and sing about it and do
+tricks with it, such as turning it topsy-turvy over his head.
+
+Notwithstanding all this he is moderate, mind you. You can't say he
+takes too much. One small jug of ale among forty is his usual allowance.
+
+He has a keen sense of humor and is easily amused. There is something
+almost pathetic about the way he goes into convulsions of laughter over
+such very small jokes. How a man like that would enjoy a real joke!
+One day he will perhaps hear a real joke. Who knows? It will, however,
+probably kill him. One grows to love the stage peasant after awhile.
+He is so good, so child-like, so unworldly. He realizes one's ideal of
+Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+THE GOOD OLD MAN.
+
+He has lost his wife. But he knows where she is--among the angels!
+
+She isn't all gone, because the heroine has her hair. "Ah, you've got
+your mother's hair," says the good old man, feeling the girl's head all
+over as she kneels beside him. Then they all wipe away a tear.
+
+The people on the stage think very highly of the good old man, but they
+don't encourage him much after the first act. He generally dies in the
+first act.
+
+If he does not seem likely to die they murder him.
+
+He is a most unfortunate old gentleman. Anything he is mixed up in seems
+bound to go wrong. If he is manager or director of a bank, smash it goes
+before even one act is over. His particular firm is always on the verge
+of bankruptcy. We have only to be told that he has put all his savings
+into a company--no matter how sound and promising an affair it may
+always have been and may still seem--to know that that company is a
+"goner."
+
+No power on earth can save it after once the good old man has become a
+shareholder.
+
+If we lived in stage-land and were asked to join any financial scheme,
+our first question would be:
+
+"Is the good old man in it?" If so, that would decide us.
+
+When the good old man is a trustee for any one he can battle against
+adversity much longer. He is a plucky old fellow, and while that trust
+money lasts he keeps a brave heart and fights on boldly. It is not until
+he has spent the last penny of it that he gives way.
+
+It then flashes across the old man's mind that his motives for having
+lived in luxury upon that trust money for years may possibly be
+misunderstood. The world--the hollow, heartless world--will call it a
+swindle and regard him generally as a precious old fraud.
+
+This idea quite troubles the good old man.
+
+But the world really ought not to blame him. No one, we are sure, could
+be more ready and willing to make amends (when found out); and to put
+matters right he will cheerfully sacrifice his daughter's happiness and
+marry her to the villain.
+
+The villain, by the way, has never a penny to bless himself with, and
+cannot even pay his own debts, let alone helping anybody else out of a
+scrape. But the good old man does not think of this.
+
+Our own personal theory, based upon a careful comparison of
+similarities, is that the good old man is in reality the stage hero
+grown old. There is something about the good old man's chuckle-headed
+simplicity, about his helpless imbecility, and his irritating damtom
+foolishness that is strangely suggestive of the hero.
+
+He is just the sort of old man that we should imagine the hero would
+develop into.
+
+We may, of course, be wrong; but that is our idea.
+
+
+
+
+THE IRISHMAN.
+
+He says "Shure" and "Bedad" and in moments of exultation "Beghorra."
+That is all the Irish he knows.
+
+He is very poor, but scrupulously honest. His great ambition is to pay
+his rent, and he is devoted to his landlord.
+
+He is always cheerful and always good. We never knew a bad Irishman on
+the stage. Sometimes a stage Irishman seems to be a bad man--such as the
+"agent" or the "informer"--but in these cases it invariably turns out in
+the end that this man was all along a Scotchman, and thus what had been
+a mystery becomes clear and explicable.
+
+The stage Irishman is always doing the most wonderful things imaginable.
+We do not see him do those wonderful things. He does them when nobody is
+by and tells us all about them afterward: that is how we know of them.
+
+We remember on one occasion, when we were young and somewhat
+inexperienced, planking our money down and going into a theater solely
+and purposely to see the stage Irishman do the things he was depicted as
+doing on the posters outside.
+
+They were really marvelous, the things he did on that poster.
+
+In the right-hand upper corner he appeared running across country on all
+fours, with a red herring sticking out from his coat-tails, while far
+behind came hounds and horsemen hunting him. But their chance of ever
+catching him up was clearly hopeless.
+
+To the left he was represented as running away over one of the wildest
+and most rugged bits of landscape we have ever seen with a very big man
+on his back. Six policemen stood scattered about a mile behind him.
+They had evidently been running after him, but had at last given up the
+pursuit as useless.
+
+In the center of the poster he was having a friendly fight with
+seventeen ladies and gentlemen. Judging from the costumes, the affair
+appeared to be a wedding. A few of the guests had already been killed
+and lay dead about the floor. The survivors, however, were enjoying
+themselves immensely, and of all that gay group he was the gayest.
+
+At the moment chosen by the artist, he had just succeeded in cracking
+the bridegroom's skull.
+
+"We must see this," said we to ourselves. "This is good." And we had a
+bob's worth.
+
+But he did not do any of the things that we have mentioned, after
+all--at least, we mean we did not see him do any of them. It seems
+he did them "off," and then came on and told his mother all about it
+afterward.
+
+He told it very well, but somehow or other we were disappointed. We had
+so reckoned on that fight.
+
+By the bye, we have noticed, even among the characters of real life, a
+tendency to perform most of their wonderful feats "off."
+
+It has been our privilege since then to gaze upon many posters on which
+have been delineated strange and moving stage events.
+
+We have seen the hero holding the villain up high above his head, and
+throwing him about that carelessly that we have felt afraid he would
+break something with him.
+
+We have seen a heroine leaping from the roof of a house on one side of
+the street and being caught by the comic man standing on the roof of a
+house on the other side of the street and thinking nothing of it.
+
+We have seen railway trains rushing into each other at the rate of sixty
+miles an hour. We have seen houses blown up by dynamite two hundred
+feet into the air. We have seen the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the
+destruction of Pompeii, and the return of the British army from Egypt in
+one "set" each.
+
+Such incidents as earthquakes, wrecks in mid-ocean, revolutions and
+battles we take no note of, they being commonplace and ordinary.
+
+But we do not go inside to see these things now. We have two looks at
+the poster instead; it is more satisfying.
+
+The Irishman, to return to our friend, is very fond of whisky--the stage
+Irishman, we mean. Whisky is forever in his thoughts--and often in other
+places belonging to him, besides.
+
+The fashion in dress among stage Irishmen is rather picturesque than
+neat. Tailors must have a hard time of it in stage Ireland.
+
+The stage Irishman has also an original taste in hats. He always wears a
+hat without a crown; whether to keep his head cool or with any political
+significance we cannot say.
+
+
+
+
+THE DETECTIVE.
+
+Ah! he is a cute one, he is. Possibly in real life he would not be
+deemed anything extraordinary, but by contrast with the average of stage
+men and women, any one who is not a born fool naturally appears somewhat
+Machiavellian.
+
+He is the only man in the play who does not swallow all the villain
+tells him and believe it, and come up with his mouth open for more. He
+is the only man who can see through the disguise of an overcoat and a
+new hat.
+
+There is something very wonderful about the disguising power of cloaks
+and hats upon the stage. This comes from the habit people on the stage
+have of recognizing their friends, not by their faces and voices, but by
+their cloaks and hats.
+
+A married man on the stage knows his wife, because he knows she wears a
+blue ulster and a red bonnet. The moment she leaves off that blue ulster
+and red bonnet he is lost and does not know where she is.
+
+She puts on a yellow cloak and a green hat, and coming in at
+another door says she is a lady from the country, and does he want a
+housekeeper?
+
+Having lost his beloved wife, and feeling that there is no one now to
+keep the children quiet, he engages her. She puzzles him a good deal,
+this new housekeeper. There is something about her that strangely
+reminds him of his darling Nell--maybe her boots and dress, which she
+has not had time to change.
+
+Sadly the slow acts pass away until one day, as it is getting near
+closing-time, she puts on the blue ulster and the red bonnet again and
+comes in at the old original door.
+
+Then he recognizes her and asks her where she has been all these cruel
+years.
+
+Even the bad people, who as a rule do possess a little sense--indeed,
+they are the only persons in the play who ever pretend to any--are
+deceived by singularly thin disguises.
+
+The detective comes in to their secret councils, with his hat drawn down
+over his eyes, and followed by the hero speaking in a squeaky voice;
+and the villains mistake them for members of the band and tell them all
+their plans.
+
+If the villains can't get themselves found out that way, then they go
+into a public tea-garden and recount their crimes to one another in a
+loud tone of voice.
+
+They evidently think that it is only fair to give the detective a
+chance.
+
+The detective must not be confounded with the policeman. The stage
+policeman is always on the side of the villain; the detective backs
+virtue.
+
+The stage detective is, in fact, the earthly agent of a discerning and
+benevolent Providence. He stands by and allows vice to be triumphant and
+the good people to be persecuted for awhile without interference. Then
+when he considers that we have all had about enough of it (to which
+conclusion, by the bye, he arrives somewhat late) he comes forward,
+handcuffs the bad people, sorts out and gives back to the good people
+all their various estates and wives, promises the chief villain twenty
+years' penal servitude, and all is joy.
+
+
+
+
+THE SAILOR.
+
+He does suffer so with his trousers. He has to stop and pull them up
+about twice every minute.
+
+One of these days, if he is not careful, there will be an accident
+happen to those trousers.
+
+If the stage sailor will follow our advice, he will be warned in time
+and will get a pair of braces.
+
+Sailors in real life do not have nearly so much trouble with their
+trousers as sailors on the stage do. Why is this? We have seen a good
+deal of sailors in real life, but on only one occasion, that we can
+remember, did we ever see a real sailor pull his trousers up.
+
+And then he did not do it a bit like they do it on the stage.
+
+The stage sailor places his right hand behind him and his left in front,
+leaps up into the air, kicks out his leg behind in a gay and bird-like
+way, and the thing is done.
+
+The real sailor that we saw began by saying a bad word. Then he leaned
+up against a brick wall and undid his belt, pulled up his "bags" as he
+stood there (he never attempted to leap up into the air), tucked in his
+jersey, shook his legs, and walked on.
+
+It was a most unpicturesque performance to watch.
+
+The thing that the stage sailor most craves in this life is that
+somebody should shiver his timbers.
+
+"Shiver my timbers!" is the request he makes to every one he meets. But
+nobody ever does it.
+
+His chief desire with regard to the other people in the play is that
+they should "belay there, avast!" We do not know how this is done; but
+the stage sailor is a good and kindly man, and we feel convinced he
+would not recommend the exercise if it were not conducive to piety and
+health.
+
+The stage sailor is good to his mother and dances the hornpipe
+beautifully. We have never found a real sailor who could dance a
+hornpipe, though we have made extensive inquiries throughout the
+profession. We were introduced to a ship's steward who offered to do us
+a cellar-flap for a pot of four-half, but that was not what we wanted.
+
+The stage sailor is gay and rollicking: the real sailors we have met
+have been, some of them, the most worthy and single-minded of men, but
+they have appeared sedate rather than gay, and they haven't rollicked
+much.
+
+The stage sailor seems to have an easy time of it when at sea. The
+hardest work we have ever seen him do then has been folding up a rope or
+dusting the sides of the ship.
+
+But it is only in his very busy moments that he has to work to this
+extent; most of his time is occupied in chatting with the captain.
+
+By the way, speaking of the sea, few things are more remarkable in their
+behavior than a stage sea. It must be difficult to navigate in a stage
+sea, the currents are so confusing.
+
+As for the waves, there is no knowing how to steer for them; they are so
+tricky. At one moment they are all on the larboard, the sea on the other
+side of the vessel being perfectly calm, and the next instant they have
+crossed over and are all on the starboard, and before the captain can
+think how to meet this new dodge, the whole ocean has slid round and got
+itself into a heap at the back of him.
+
+Seamanship is useless against such very unprofessional conduct as this,
+and the vessel is wrecked.
+
+A wreck at (stage) sea is a truly awful sight. The thunder and lightning
+never leave off for an instant; the crew run round and round the mast
+and scream; the heroine, carrying the stage child in her arms and with
+her back hair down, rushes about and gets in everybody's way. The comic
+man alone is calm!
+
+The next instant the bulwarks fall down flat on the deck and the mast
+goes straight up into the sky and disappears, then the water reaches the
+powder magazine and there is a terrific explosion.
+
+This is followed by a sound as of linen sheets being ripped up, and the
+passengers and crew hurry downstairs into the cabin, evidently with the
+idea of getting out of the way of the sea, which has climbed up and is
+now level with the deck.
+
+The next moment the vessel separates in the middle and goes off R. and
+L., so as to make room for a small boat containing the heroine, the
+child, the comic man, and one sailor.
+
+The way small boats are managed at (stage) sea is even more wonderful
+than the way in which ships are sailed.
+
+To begin with, everybody sits sideways along the middle of the boat, all
+facing the starboard. They do not attempt to row. One man does all the
+work with one scull. This scull he puts down through the water till it
+touches the bed of the ocean, and then he shoves.
+
+"Deep-sea punting" would be the technical term for the method, we
+presume.
+
+In this way do they toil--or rather, to speak correctly, does the one
+man toil--through the awful night, until with joy they see before them
+the light-house rocks.
+
+The light-house keeper comes out with a lantern. The boat is run in
+among the breakers and all are saved.
+
+And then the band plays.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Stage-Land, by Jerome K. Jerome
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