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.