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.