Part 22

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?