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+*** Project Gutenberg etext of Stage-Land by Jerome K. Jerome ***
+
+
+Scanned and proofed by Ron Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) and Amy
+Thomte, from a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow", 
+published by A. L. Burt.
+
+Notes on the editing of this text:
+
+1.  Italicized phrases are delimited by the underline character ("_").
+2.  Hyphens have been left in the text only where it was the clear
+intention of the author.  For example, throughout the text, "tonight"
+and "tomorrow" appear as "to-night" and "to-morrow".  This is
+intentional, and is not simply a legacy of words having been broken
+across lines in the printed text.
+3.  The pound (currency) symbol has been replaced by the word
+"pounds".
+
+
+
+
+STAGE-LAND.
+
+
+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 be 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 correct{y, 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 Project Gutenberg etext of Stage-Land by Jerome K. Jerome
+
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