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 n.o.body 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 princ.i.p.als.
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 sc.r.a.pe. 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 n.o.body 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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.