There is an old conundrum song that begins--"Why do summer roses fade?"
The late ARTEMUS WARD thought they did it as a matter of business. Why
do the "Two Roses" bloom? That is WALLACK'S business. Also just now it
happens to be mine.
The modern English comedy is divided into two kinds. Everybody will
consider this statement a conundrum, and answer,--"Bad and good."
Wrong, my little dears. All your lexicographers agree that "kind" means
a "race," which is absurd, because a horse-race, for instance, is
anything but kind. But they explain by saying that it means a genus.
Good plays are not a genus. They are freaks of nature, like the woolly
horse and the sacred cow; only, when they are produced, so many people
will not pay money to see them as to see the w.h. and the s.c.
The division of modern plays, as JONATHAN EDWARDS said wittily, in his
sparkling treatise on "The Will," is into the tame and the wild. For the
latter the recipe is simple. Take some black false beads, hatchets,
pistols, a "dog"--not a quadruped, but the article which was left in Mr.
NATHAN'S hall--a woman in black hair and a white garment, suggestive of
repose, strolling at midnight by the banks of the prattling East River,
foot of Grand Street, and set a house afire at the end of the third act.
That is the BOUCICAULT style, and as the flippant EDWARDS goes on to
observe, it draws like a factory chimney in the Bowery and at NIBLO's.
But this sort of thing will not do at all at WALLACK'S. Of course not.
STODDART is permitted to swear there, to be sure; but I understand that
he does it for fear people should call WALLACK'S the hall of the Old
Men's Christian Association. With that exception there is, as somebody
said about something, absolutely nothing to offend the most fastidious.
Any person who exhibits excitement upon the stage is discharged at the
end of the week with a pension. Miss MOORE is permitted to weep, but she
does it so quietly and nicely that it does not disturb anybody. And the
ushers have received strict orders to eject anybody in the audience who
manifests any marked interest in the performance. A friend of mine from
Peoria once went to WALLACK'S, and took no pains whatever to conceal his
admiration of the acting. On the contrary, at a particularly nice point,
he actually clapped his hands together twice. Of course he was arrested
for breach of the peace, and locked up over night. But the management
declined, to prosecute when it was represented to them that the man had
lately seen McKEAN BUCHANAN at the Peoria Academy of Music, and that he
could not help testifying his gratification that LESTER WALLACK behaved
so differently, and he was discharged. He went back to Peoria, and told
his neighbors that there was a place in New York where they got up a
yawning match (this coarse person called it a "gaping bee") every night
between the stage and the audience, and the stage always won.
Now we know, that is those of us who are in good society, that what this
uncouth rustic mistook for indifference is the air of society.
TALLEYRAND said, or somebody said he said, that the use of language was
to conceal thought. Go to WALLACK'S and you will see that the art of
acting is to suppress emotions. Everything is below concert-pitch,
except perhaps the orchestra, which insists upon playing lively and
popular music, instead of doing the Dead March in Saul for a funeral
procession while the audience files out dreamily to drink, and empties
some dull opiate to the drains. The entire audience are making heroic
efforts all through the play to prevent each other from seeing that they
know they are listening to the most finished acting to be seen anywhere,
and looking at the prettiest stage pictures ever set. All the actors are
all the while trying to conceal the fact that they are doing any good
acting. The whole theatre is in a condition of sweet repose, like the
placid bosom of a mill-pond on a summer afternoon, when STODDART shoots
the Dam.
Well, when you have society theatres, where they do this sort of thing,
you must have society plays. The recipe for these is different from the
gallon of gore and the ton of thunder which make up the other sort. You
must have your actors representing people who are always bored to death,
if you wish to maintain the respect and patronage of a society audience,
whose ambition is to seem to be always bored to death in real life. You
must have what the sweet but-not exemplary SWINBURNE calls "the lilies
and languors of virtue" at WALLACK'S, to balance "the raptures and roses
of vice" which you get at the sensational shops. People may fall in
love, in a mild way, as they do in society, but they must not undergo
the ravages of that passion, as it is exhibited out of society. They
are, so to speak, vaccinated for love, and they are safe from the
virulent confluent or even the varioloid type of the original malady.
They may also transact business, of a high-toned sort, and sometimes
they get out of temper. But their main employment is to wander about and
yawn, or to sit down and sneer.
There is a laborious lunatic who makes ice at the fair of the American
Institute, with the thermometer at 80┬░ or so in the shade. (Note to
Editor.--I don't know the man from ADAM, and have received no
consideration from him whatever for this allusion,) I believe his ice
costs this ingenious individual about four dollars per pound to
make--but no matter. Well, this is exactly the trick by which you make
society plays. ROBERTSON does it to perfection. He is the patent
refrigerator. And the man who did "The Two Roses" has plagiarized his
process and reproduced his results. I don't know whether the idea is to
interest people in what is uninteresting, or to uninterest people in
what is interesting. But he does both.
Perhaps, however, some absurd person would like to know something about
this play. There is a commercial traveller in it, who is taken,
by-the-by, bodily and even to his checked trousers, out of one of
ROBERTSON'S plays. The only addition that has been made is that this one
swears. But then STODDART personates him. This commercial traveller has
a wife. To whom, by-the-by, did it ever occur, before the author of this
play, that commercial travellers could have wives? The wife of this
itinerant commercial person is a stationary commercial person, who keeps
a boarding-house which the youths, the heroes of the play, have the
misery to inhabit. All this is undeniably low for WALLACK'S, and the
sales-ladies in the audience express their sense of that fact by
intimating that EFFIE GERMON'S jewels are not real, and the
sales-gentlemen by confiding to one another at the bar, whither they
wend after the second act to quaff the maddening sarsaparilla, that
WALLACK'S is running down.
As I have abused several revered institutions in these few lines. I
will, in terror of public opinion and private wrath, execute a small
variation on my usual and familiar autograph, and sign myself