exhibitions were generally well attended, let us inquire what there
was in the condition and circumstances of the theatre at that period
to have rendered this a matter of course. We reply at once, that plays
were then as well written, as well _got up_, and as well acted, as any
picture was then painted, or any novel or poem written. The drama was
at that time on a perfect level with, or perhaps even superior to,
the current literature of the day, or any other instrument of public
amusement which existed. Nor was it beneath the standard of the general
manners of society. It exhibited, in a gross enough manner, the vices
of the age; but the people whose vices were exhibited were rendered
insensible by those very vices to the grossness of the scene.
The theatre is now in quite a different condition from what it was
in then. Whether owing to the want of legislative enactments, which
might encourage literary men in writing for the theatre, or to some
other cause, our dramatic entertainments are now of a character much
beneath or behind the age. Our acting plays are either the old stock,
displeasing us with the exhibition of obsolete vices; or modern trash,
full of exaggerated character and sentiment, trusting for success,
perhaps, to romantic scenery and machinery; or literal transcripts of
nursery fables. Our drama, overlooking some better qualities, is, in a
great measure, a compound of childishness, indecency, buffoonery, and,
to no small extent, of profanity; in every point of view fifty years in
taste behind our current fictitious literature, which, in itself, is
susceptible of great amendment.
In Great Britain the drama has always appealed to the less serious
and virtuous part of the community. At the time of the civil war,
and after the re-establishment of the theatre at the Restoration,
it was altogether a Cavalier thing, and, like the Cavalier party in
general, too apt to make debauchery a mark of rectitude in politics.
This character it has never entirely shaken off. With the exception
of a certain number of mawkish and tawdry aphorisms scattered over
our modern plays, they still maintain, in some measure, their old
war against the decencies and proprieties of life. The truth is, the
theatre has become so exclusively resorted to by a less serious part
of the community, that it could hardly attempt to conciliate the other
class, lest, in the vain effort, it lose the customers it has.
If the players thus produce an article of entertainment inferior
both in talent and in taste to the other things which compete for
the business of amusing the public, it is not to be wondered at that
their houses are deserted. For the crown which at present purchases
a night’s entertainment at the theatre to one member of a family—an
entertainment partly childish, perhaps, and almost certain to be
somewhat immoral—that whole family can be supplied for a whole month
with the best literary productions of the day from a circulating
library, or it can purchase a single volume, which not only gives it
rational entertainment and instruction for several nights, but remains
a constant and ready instrument for repeating this entertainment and
instruction whenever it is required. If we coolly reflect on the
respective reputations which the drama and literature bear in the
world, we will find that only a certain number of people wish well
to the former, while the latter is an object of almost universal
attachment and national pride. The fact is, that the drama has shut
itself out by its own misconduct from the sympathies of half the
public, if not a much larger portion. It is still dabbling in the
low vices and mean order of feelings which prevailed in the reign
of George the Second, or else in the nursery tales which lulled our
cradles; while literature, shooting far ahead, is replete with the
superior virtues and extensive benevolences of the present age. And
not only does _literature_ compete with the stage. Music, and other
accomplishments of private life, are also now resorted to, for the
purpose of furnishing an innocent amusement to the family circle—an
amusement less attractive, perhaps, than the theatre, which, with
all its errors, has still a powerful inherent charm, but preferred,
nevertheless, as making up in simplicity, harmlessness, and cheapness,
what it wants in the power of excitement.
When we speak of the stupidity and bad taste of the plays, we do not
enumerate all the disadvantages of the theatre. As if every thing
connected with the establishment were doomed to be of the same order,
we find the players also exciting disgust in all well-regulated
minds by the strange code of morality which they have been pleased
to set up for themselves. Of course, we do not shut our eyes to the
numerous instances of respectable and well-behaved actors, which
occur nowhere, perhaps, so frequently as in the minor capital which
we inhabit. But, as we remarked in a former paper, we must not have
great generalities ruined or broken down by unimportant exceptions.
Taken as a whole, the players are a more dissolute fraternity than
the members of any other profession; while some of them, ranking as
the very highest in professional merit, commit transcendent breaches
of the most sacred moral laws, as if to show how independent they
are of all the rules of decent society. We would not gratify the
wretched vanity which perhaps is one of the principal causes of those
errors, by mentioning particular cases; but they are too notorious to
require being specified. It is sometimes set forward as a plea for
the extenuation of those offences, that the life of a player is more
beset with temptations than any other. But what an argument is here
against the whole system of play-acting! Another plea is, that the
public has no business with any thing but the public appearance of a
player—has no right to think of their private lives; as if a person
doing all he can to destroy the safeguards of domestic happiness by
action and example, were to be equally well treated by society, as a
person who does what is in his power to contribute to its happiness.
Society must, in the eyes of these pleaders, be a slavish thing indeed,
if it is supposed that it must patiently submit to every insult and
injury which it may please the sublime caprice of a buffoon to inflict
upon it. And is the player judged less leniently than an offender in
any other walk of life? When a tradesman commits an outrage on public
decency, is he cherished on account of it by society? Is he not scouted
for it, exactly as the player is, or, we should rather say, _ought
to be_—for it can hardly be said that _he_ is ever condemned for his
offences by the regular friends of the stage, though the theatre is,
on his account, still more resolutely abstained from by the good, who
abstained from it before.
If the players thus debase themselves by the impurity of their lives,
and thereby render themselves unfit to be looked upon or listened to
by the majority of society—if they continue to represent dramas suited
to the taste of a past age, or else adapted only to the sympathies of
children—if they persist in retaining about their whole system vicious
forms of speech, indelicate gestures, and a code of moral feeling
and action, all of which have long been pronounced intolerable in
good society, how can they expect their theatres to be so prosperous
as they once were, more especially when purer and better modes of
entertainment are every where rising into competition with them? The
person who pens these thoughts is by no means an enemy to theatricals
in the abstract. With the most respectful deference to those who see
in dramatic entertainments an express hostility to the divine law, he
retains the conviction that they might be rendered as good and innocent
a means as any other for producing that great end—the diversion of
the public mind by amusement from the follies and vices of absolute
vacuity. He does not consider the theatre, or any other amusement, so
much with a reference to the good which it may do, as with respect to
the evil which it may prevent. It is clear, however, that the really
good and pure can never become the friends of the theatre, so long as
it remains unreformed. There must be a combination among the virtuous
actors to exclude the vicious from their body. A number of antiquated
and absurd fashions of the stage must be brought nearer to the standard
of ordinary natural life. And the best literary men of the day must be
encouraged by legislative enactments to produce a crop of new plays
with a stronger moral bent than the generality of those now existing.
Till all this is done, and the theatre become as noted in public
fame for a friendliness to what is good, as it has hitherto been for
the reverse, it must be content to occupy its present degraded place
amongst our prevailing modes of public entertainment.
RECOGNITIONS.
“Dignus vindice _nod_-us.”——
If you be a person that have lived for a long time in any large town,
you must have ere this felt the dreadful inconvenience of knowing
and being known by every body. The courtesy of society demands that,
on meeting any one in the street, of whom you have the slightest
acquaintance, you must _not_ “affect to nod,” like Alexander, but give
a real _bona fide_ nod, or, if you please, a bow, as a mark of respect
or regard—a practice which leads to a thousand disagreeable sensations
in the day, till at last you almost resolve that your progress shall
be like that of a British war-chariot—CUTTING right and left, without
regard to man, woman, or child. It is not that you have any abstract
disinclination to pay this tribute to friendship; it is the frequency
and the iteration of the thing that annoys you. You could tolerate,
perhaps, a certain number of nods in the day—_I_ would willingly
compound for twenty—and it would be all very well if you only met a
friend on the street once in the month or so. But this is not the way
of it: you cannot be abroad two hours (supposing that you are of long
standing in the town) without meeting fifty people and upwards, to
whom you must “vail your haughty head,” and, what is worst of all, the
half of these are people whom you met and nodded to yesterday, and
the day before, and every day before that again, back to the creation
of the world. With many of these persons, your acquaintance at first
was of the very slightest nature. You met the man in a steam-boat,
and had your respective names mentioned by a friend. You left a room
one day as he was entering, and you were introduced, and, after
exchanging only three words, made a friendly bow to each other, and
parted. Perhaps he was introduced to you passingly on the street by
some person to whom you had been introduced several years before, in
the same transient way, by an individual whose acquaintance of you was
originally of so slight a character that you had even then forgot for
some years how it commenced. Your reminiscences upon the whole subject
are a Generation of Shadows, traced back to Nothing. Possibly you sat
next to him one night, “consule Planco,” at a mason-lodge, and to this
blessed hour have never so much as learned his name. When it happens
that you do not see or meet these acquaintances for six months after
your first rencontre, the affair has by that time got cool enough
to justify you mutually in cutting each other. But in most cases it
happens quite differently. On the very morning, perhaps, after having
scraped acquaintance with a merry fellow in some promiscuous company,
you meet him going abroad, like yourself, to his place of business.
As nothing of the world, or its concerns, has as yet got between you
and your recollections of last night’s conviviality, you pull up with
him for a minute, shake hands, laugh cordially in each other’s faces,
hope each other is quite well after yesternight’s business, remark
what a deal of fun there was, what a deuced funny fellow that was who
sung the comic songs, and so forth; and then, with another cordial
shake of each other’s hands, you part off, each to the serious duties
of the day. Unfortunately, it happens that this new acquaintance of
yours has to go to his place of business exactly at the same time
in the morning with yourself, and that your places of residence and
business are co-relatively in opposite situations. It is, therefore,
your doom to cross each other’s path regularly every morning at ten
minutes before ten, for all the rest of your natural lives. Your eyes
begin to open upon this appalling fact on the second day. You meet your
man _then_, exactly at the same spot as on the morning before; when,
the conviviality of the penult evening being totally spent, both in
respect of its effect on your mind, and as a subject of conversation,
you stand in an agony of a minute’s duration, talking to each other of
you know not what, till, fortunately, perhaps, a friend comes up who
is going your way, and you hook yourself upon him, and take a hurried
leave of your new acquaintance. Next morning you content yourself
with shaking your friend by the hand cordially without stopping. Next
morning, again, the affair has degenerated into a laughing nod. Next,
it is an ordinary nod; at which point it continues ever after, till it
is evident to both of you, as you approach each other, that you are
beginning to be fairly tired of existence, and wish, mutually, that
it were all well over with you, so far as this breathing world is
concerned, and the whole affair hushed up in the silence of the grave.
It is not alone in the monotony of this system of recognition that the
misery lies. You are also put to a great deal of pain and difficulty,
in many cases, by the rank of the individuals to be recognised. Every
man of the world has occasion to be brought into contact now and then
with persons superior to himself, but who do not scruple to make
themselves familiar with him in his own house or place of business.
Now, the plague is, how to treat these people on the street. If their
rank be very far above your own, the case is comparatively easy; for
a bow, with an elevation of the hat, is readily awarded on your part,
and graciously received on his. But should his place in society be
just a little above your own, or such as you expect to attain very
speedily—or should he be just a little longer started in the general
race of prosperity than yourself—then it is perplexing indeed. Man has
no antipathy to the brother worms who are so far beneath his own level
as never to be brought into contrast with him. A nobleman is quite at
his ease with his tailor. But it is very different with the individuals
who are just a little lower than ourselves, and liable to be confounded
with us. We could tolerate the _profanum et ignobile vulgus_ itself,
rather than the people whose manners and circumstances in life are but
one step beneath our own. Hence, one is liable to perpetual grievances
on the street, through, what he thinks, the forwardness of some people,
and the haughtiness of others. Alternately cutting and cut, on he
goes, in a state of unhappiness beyond all description. Sometimes he
avoids recognizing, through fear of its being offensive, a person who
was fondly anxious to have his nod, and takes it very ill that he does
not get it. Sometimes he is in the reverse predicament, and proffers
a condescending bow, or intends to do so, to one who, putting quite
a different construction on their respective degrees of consequence,
coolly overlooks him.
In short, what with one thing and another, walking on the street is
an exceedingly disagreeable exercise. For my part, having been long
connected with the city I inhabit, I am obliged to take a thousand
ingenious expedients in order to get along with any degree of comfort.
For one thing, I would sooner walk some miles barefooted over broken
glass, than parade on the principal streets of the city at high twelve.
If I were to attempt a passage that way, I might go as I have been told
Oechlenschlager the Danish poet does through the streets of Copenhagen,
my hat in my hand, and my body in a perpetual inclination. I have
to seek all possible kinds of by-ways, through alleys profound and
obscure; and when I cross a thoroughfare, it is with the same dogged
straight-forward look with which a man swims across a dangerous river.
When I do happen, in a moment of facility or confidence, to venture
upon an open street, I have all kinds of expedients for avoiding and
diminishing the pains of recognition. When you see an acquaintance
approaching, you must consider the relative circumstances. Much depends
on the place of meeting—much on the time—much on the crowded or empty
state of the streets, and much, of course, on the degree of your
intimacy with him, and the distance of time since you last met. If it
be a vacant street, and not a business time of the day, and six months
since you last met him, you are in for a quarter of an hour’s palaver
as sure as you live, and hardly even a parting _then_, unless you can
either of you manage to get up a good witticism, under cover of which
you may escape. If the street be crowded, and the time a busy one, you
are tolerably safe, even although it should have been a twelvemonth
since you met before. In this case, you fly past with a hurried nod,
which seems to say, “We are busy just now, but will have another
opportunity of stopping to speak.” This is a nod of adjournment, as
it were, and it is one of great satisfaction to both parties, for
both argue, of course—though they don’t put that into the nod—that,
as it is a twelvemonth since they last met, it may be another before
they meet again. Should you meet a man in a vacant street, even in
the busiest part of the day, then the former circumstance annuls the
latter, and you must stand and deliver, even although you be too late
for an appointment of the most interesting character. On the other
hand, if you meet your man in the leisurely part of the day, in a
crowded street, you get off with a nod, pretending to yourself that you
are carried away by the current. Sometimes you may not take advantage
of your good fortune in this last case, but so bring it about that
you get into collision with your friend, and begin a conversation.
In this case, even although you have only asked him how he does—not
caring in the least what he has to answer—and though you positively
have not another idea to interchange with him, he finds it necessary
to disengage himself from the throng in order to reply. You now get
upon the curb-stone, or upon the causeway, where, of course, you have
no more advantage from the crowded state of the street than a fish has
of a river after it has been thrown upon the bank. You are now in the
same predicament as if you had met your friend in the same cool part
of the day _in a perfectly empty street_, and therefore, when he has
answered your precious question as to his health, you are as fairly in
for a quarter of an hour of wretched, bald, wishy-washy conversation
about all kinds of nothings that you don’t care one farthing about, as
ever you were in your life. The only thing that can now save you is
either a joke to laugh yourselves asunder upon, a crowd raised at a
distant part of the street by some such matter as a child ridden over
by a coach, or else, what is not a bad means of separation, though
sometimes dangerous, you cut off one grievous encumbrance by taking
on another; that is, you see another friend coming up your way, and,
pretending you have something to say to him, shake off the old love and
take on with the new: in which case it is not improbable that you spend
longer time at the end of the street with this last individual than you
might have had to spend with the former one if you had continued with
him, and only given the other man a passing nod; but, of course, that
is all the fortune of war, and, having done what seemed best under the
circumstances, you must rather blame fate than your own imprudence.
Consider well, however, in such a case, whether you are likely to get
soonest off with the new or the old love; for if you take on with a
bore of ten minutes’ power, in order to get off with one of only five,
merely because he is going your way, and promises no interruption in
the first instance, you may only fall into Scylla, seeking to avoid
Charybdis.
After all, as in every matter arising from the affairs of this world,
a great deal of our happiness, so far as it is concerned by the system
of recognition, lies with ourselves. If we are prudent, and take
counsel from experience, we may avoid much of this nodding and bowing
misery which would otherwise fall to our share. A man, for instance,
should not be always goggling and staring about him; otherwise he will
be sure to fall in with flying nods, which he could as well dispense
with, if he does not even hit some person, perhaps, on the other side
of the way, who, not having seen him for a long time, thinks it is
duty—Lord confound him!—to come across the Hellespont of mud, and
shake the spirits out of him with half an hour of tediousness and
common-place. When you debouch from your door, never look along the
street in the direction you are not to travel, or ten to one but you
see some one who, having the infelicity, poor devil, to catch your
eye, must put himself on to a canter to come up to you; and so you
get mutually entangled, perhaps for half the day. I give this caution
with a particular emphasis; for I have observed that nine out of
every ten men look back in the way described, as if it were one of
the involuntary motions or inclinations of human nature. As you are
walking along, never cast your regards upon any one coming obliquely
across the street, or in all probability you are shot dead by an eye of
your acquaintance, which, if it had not hit you, would have passed on
innocuous. The eye is the principal mischief in all these cases. A man
is often snared by that part of him, and dragged a hundred yards along
a dirty street, for all the world like a silly salmon hooked by the
nose, and laid, after half a mile of tugging and hauling, exhausted on
the shore. Keep your eye well to yourself, and you are tolerably safe;
for of this you may be assured, no man will come up to attract your
attention, unless he be a country cousin, who was just looking about
for you. Every mother’s son of them is actuated by the same principles
with yourself, and is glad to escape all the nodding he can. So
reciprocal is this feeling, that many persons whom you are taking means
to avoid, will, if you observe them narrowly, be found to be doing all
they can to assist in the process. If you pretend, for instance, that
you cannot see that gentleman there coming aslant the way, on account
of the intense brightness of the sun, you will see out at the tail of
your eye that he is pretending to be as much put about by the sunshine
as yourself, and is doing all he can to shade his eyes from Phœbus
and you, exactly in the same fashion with yourself. If you walk, as
you ought to do, with your eyes fixed below what painters call the
point of sight, but suddenly raise them for a moment, in order to look
about you, it is ten to one but you see your very bosom friend—your
confessor—the man whom you wear in your heart of hearts—in the act of
sneakingly withdrawing his eye from your countenance, for the purpose
of getting past you unnoticed. Take no scorn on account of these
things, but put it all down rather to the strength of friendship; for
can there be any stronger test of that sentiment, than the desire of
saving those whom we love from any thing that is disagreeable to them?
It has been already remarked, that if you be in the regular habit of
meeting and nodding to a person every now and then, the system is kept
up till death do you part. On the other hand, if you can avoid seeing a
person for some considerable time, the nod becomes _efféte_, and you
ever after see, as if you saw not, each other. Sometimes, however,
one gets a great relief in the midst of a fixed and hopeless nodding
acquaintance, by happening to meet once more at the social board in
some friend’s house, when you re-invigorate the principle, gather fresh
intimacy, and perhaps, after all, take refuge from the unnecessary
monotony of nodding terms in a serious friendship.
If you can help yourself by this means, it may be all very well, though
certainly it is rather hard that one should be forced into an intimacy
with a man merely because he crosses your path rather oftener than
the most of your other slight acquaintances. The best way, however,
to lessen this part of the evils of life, is to walk with _as little
circumspection as possible_. So ends my preachment about RECOGNITIONS.
THE LADYE THAT I LOVE.