Whenever a man remarks "I've had a mighty adventurous life, I have," we
usually set him down as a former king of the Coney Island carnival or a
recently returned delegate from an Elks' convention in Kansas City. It
has been our somewhat bitter experience that the man who pictures
himself as a great adventurer is almost invariably spurious. As a matter
of fact, the rule holds good for great wits, great lovers and great
drinkers. But it applies with particular pertinence to romantic folk.
A wise professor at Harvard once remarked that he didn't believe that
the ancients realized that they were ancients. We have somewhat the same
feeling about quaint people and romantic people and adventurous people.
Of course we must admit the existence in life and in literature of
authentic but sophisticated romantic figures. Cyrano was one and, to a
lesser extent, d'Artagnan. Porthos is on our side. But the best example
we can remember is Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer pictured himself as a
romantic figure. Huck didn't. When Huck went a-wandering he thought it
was because the store clothes the widow had given him were
uncomfortable. It was actually another itch, but he did not know its
name. This to our mind is the essence of true adventure. When a man
comes to recognize romance he is in a position to bargain and parley. He
is not the true adventurer. Things no longer just happen to him. He has
to go out and seek them. He has lost his amateur standing.
Huck, who didn't know what it was all about, had much more exciting
adventures than Tom and he was a more fascinating figure in the
happening. Jim would also come into our category of true adventurers,
and, to skip back a bit, Tom Jones is almost type perfect. Just so
Sancho Panza seems to us more fundamentally romantic than Don Quixote,
and we have always been more interested in what happened to Doctor
Watson than in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock foresaw
things--and that is fatal to romance.
The Prodigal Son belongs in our list, and Andrew Jackson, and Lot's
wife, and Eddie Rickenbacker, and Lord Jim, and Ajax, and Little Red
Riding Hood, and Thomas Edison, and the father of the Katzenjammer Kids,
and most of Bluebeard's wives and all the people who refused to go into
the ark.
While we are willing to admit that there are other types who are
successfully romantic, in spite of self-consciousness, they are the
exceptions. We are hardly willing to accept them in a group. This brings
us to Mrs. Fiske's new play, _Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans_, at which we
have been aiming throughout the article.
There are nine characters in the play, and the author pictures each of
them as being distinctly aware that he is an adventurous character, in a
quaint garden, in a romantic city, in a mad story. It is true that these
people do some romantic and adventurous things, but never without first
predicting that they are going to be romantic, and then explaining after
it is all over that they have been romantic. From our point of view
there is too much challenge in this. Whenever a man or woman in a play
or in life promises that he is about to do something quaint we have an
irresistible desire to lay him 6 to 5 that it won't be any such thing.
Then if the decision is left to us we always decide against him.
The method of the preliminary puff and the subsequent official
confirmation is decidedly a mistake in the case of the character
portrayed by Mrs. Fiske in _Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans_. Mrs. Fiske showed
herself quite capable of carrying the role of a spirited, romantic and
adventurous belle, and it was unnecessary to have her triumph so
carefully prepared in advance by the predictions of her servants as to
what she would do when she "got her Jim Crow up."
We might have been content to accept some of the other characters as
sure enough romantic figures if they had not been so confoundedly
confident that they were. They fairly challenged us into disbelief. The
author, to our mind, was wrong from the beginning in describing his
comedy on the program as a comedy of "moonshine, madness and
make-believe." Moonshine and madness are both elusive stage qualities.
An author is fortunate indeed if he can achieve them. He is foolish to
take the risk of predicting them. If he succeeds in presenting authentic
moonshine and madness he will not need to inform the audience of the
fact by means of the program and still less through his characters.
_Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans_ left us much more convinced of the
make-believe.
A play which affected us in somewhat similar fashion was _The Gipsy
Trail_, produced here a season or so ago. In this play the author
presented a character who seemed to be a truly romantic figure for at
least half the play. Then he was suddenly trapped into a confession that
he was romantic. Somebody asked him about it, and, most unfortunately,
he set out to prove that he was an adventurer in a long speech beginning
"I have fried eggs on top of the Andes" or in some such manner, and from
that moment we grew away from him. We knew him as no true adventurer,
but as a man who would eventually write a book or at best a series of
articles for a Sunday magazine.
The real tragedy of romance is that any man who appreciates his own
loses it. In this workaday world we can live only by taking in the other
fellow's adventures.