THE COMIC LOVERS
Oh, they are funny! The comic lovers' mission in life is to serve as a sort of "relief" to the misery caused the audience by the other characters in the play; and all that is wanted now is something that will be a relief to the comic lovers.
They have nothing to do with the play, but they come on immediately after anything very sad has happened and make love. This is why we watch sad scenes on the stage with such patience. We are not eager for them to be got over. Maybe they are very uninteresting scenes, as well as sad ones, and they make us yawn; but we have no desire to see them hurried through. The longer they take the better pleased we are: we know that when they are finished the comic lovers will come on.
They are always very rude to each other, the comic lovers. Everybody is more or less rude and insulting to every body else on the stage; they call it repartee there! We tried the effect of a little stage "repartee" once upon some people in real life, and we wished we hadn't afterward. It was too subtle for them. They summoned us before a magistrate for "using language calculated to cause a breach of the peace." We were fined 2 pounds and costs!
They are more lenient to "wit and humor" on the stage, and know how to encourage the art of vituperation. But the comic lovers carry the practice almost to excess. They are more than rude – they are abusive. They insult each other from morning to night. What their married life will be like we shudder to think!
In the various slanging matches and bullyragging competitions which form their courtship it is always the maiden that is most successful. Against her merry flow of invective and her girlish wealth of offensive personalities the insolence and abuse of her boyish adorer cannot stand for one moment.
To give an idea of how the comic lovers woo, we perhaps cannot do better than subjoin the following brief example:
SCENE: Main thoroughfare in populous district of London. Time: Noon. Not a soul to be seen anywhere.
Enter comic loveress R., walking in the middle of the road.
Enter comic lover L., also walking in the middle of the road.
They neither see the other until they bump against each other in the center.
HE. Why, Jane! Who'd a' thought o' meeting you here!
SHE. You evidently didn't – stoopid!
HE. Halloo! got out o' bed the wrong side again? I say, Jane, if you go on like that you'll never get a man to marry you.
SHE. So I thought when I engaged myself to you.
HE. Oh! come, Jane, don't be hard.
SHE. Well, one of us must be hard. You're soft enough.
HE. Yes, I shouldn't want to marry you if I weren't. Ha! ha! ha!
SHE. Oh, you gibbering idiot! (Said archly.)
HE. So glad I am. We shall make a capital match (attempts to kiss her).
SHE (slipping away). Yes, and you'll find I'm a match that can strike (fetches him a violent blow over the side if the head).
HE (holding his jaw – in a literal sense, we mean). I can't help feeling smitten by her.
SHE. Yes, I'm a bit of a spanker, ain't I?
HE. Spanker. I call you a regular stunner. You've nearly made me silly.
SHE (laughing playfully). No, nature did that for you, Joe, long ago.
HE. Ah, well, you've made me smart enough now, you boss-eyed old cow, you!
SHE. Cow! am I? Ah, I suppose that's what makes me so fond of a calf, you German sausage on legs! You —
HE. Go along. Your mother brought you up on sour milk.
SHE. Yah! They weaned you on thistles, didn't they?
And so on, with such like badinage do they hang about in the middle of that road, showering derision and contumely upon each other for full ten minutes, when, with one culminating burst of mutual abuse, they go off together fighting and the street is left once more deserted.
It is very curious, by the bye, how deserted all public places become whenever a stage character is about. It would seem as though ordinary citizens sought to avoid them. We have known a couple of stage villains to have Waterloo Bridge, Lancaster Place, and a bit of the Strand entirely to themselves for nearly a quarter of an hour on a summer's afternoon while they plotted a most diabolical outrage.
As for Trafalgar Square, the hero always chooses that spot when he wants to get away from the busy crowd and commune in solitude with his own bitter thoughts; and the good old lawyer leaves his office and goes there to discuss any very delicate business over which he particularly does not wish to be disturbed.
And they all make speeches there to an extent sufficient to have turned the hair of the late lamented Sir Charles Warren White with horror. But it is all right, because there is nobody near to hear them. As far as the eye can reach, not a living thing is to be seen. Northumberland Avenue, the Strand, and St. Martin's Lane are simply a wilderness. The only sign of life about is a 'bus at the top of Whitehall, and it appears to be blocked.
How it has managed to get blocked we cannot say. It has the whole road to itself, and is, in fact, itself the only traffic for miles round. Yet there it sticks for hours. The police make no attempt to move it on and the passengers seem quite contented.
The Thames Embankment is an even still more lonesome and desolate part. Wounded (stage) spirits fly from the haunts of men and, leaving the hard, cold world far, far behind them, go and die in peace on the Thames Embankment. And other wanderers, finding their skeletons afterward, bury them there and put up rude crosses over the graves to mark the spot.
The comic lovers are often very young, and when people on the stage are young they are young. He is supposed to be about sixteen and she is fifteen. But they both talk as if they were not more than seven.
In real life "boys" of sixteen know a thing or two, we have generally found. The average "boy" of sixteen nowadays usually smokes cavendish and does a little on the Stock Exchange or makes a book; and as for love! he has quite got over it by that age. On the stage, however, the new-born babe is not in it for innocence with the boy lover of sixteen.
So, too, with the maiden. Most girls of fifteen off the stage, so our experience goes, know as much as there is any actual necessity for them to know, Mr. Gilbert notwithstanding; but when we see a young lady of fifteen on the stage we wonder where her cradle is.
The comic lovers do not have the facilities for love-making that the hero and heroine do. The hero and heroine have big rooms to make love in, with a fire and plenty of easy-chairs, so that they can sit about in picturesque attitudes and do it comfortably. Or if they want to do it out of doors they have a ruined abbey, with a big stone seat in the center, and moonlight.
The comic lovers, on the other hand, have to do it standing up all the time, in busy streets, or in cheerless-looking and curiously narrow rooms in which there is no furniture whatever and no fire.
And there is always a tremendous row going on in the house when the comic lovers are making love. Somebody always seems to be putting up pictures in the next room, and putting them up boisterously, too, so that the comic lovers have to shout at each other.
THE PEASANTS
They are so clean. We have seen peasantry off the stage, and it has presented an untidy – occasionally a disreputable and unwashed – appearance; but the stage peasant seems to spend all his wages on soap and hair-oil.
They are always round the corner – or rather round the two corners – and they come on in a couple of streams and meet in the center; and when they are in their proper position they smile.
There is nothing like the stage peasants' smile in this world – nothing so perfectly inane, so calmly imbecile.
They are so happy. They don't look it, but we know they are because they say so. If you don't believe them, they dance three steps to the right and three steps to the left back again. They can't help it. It is because they are so happy.
When they are more than usually rollicking they stand in a semicircle, with their hands on each other's shoulders, and sway from side to side, trying to make themselves sick. But this is only when they are simply bursting with joy.
Stage peasants never have any work to do.
Sometimes we see them going to work, sometimes coming home from work, but nobody has ever seen them actually at work. They could not afford to work – it would spoil their clothes.
They are very sympathetic, are stage peasants. They never seem to have any affairs of their own to think about, but they make up for this by taking a three-hundred-horse-power interest in things in which they have no earthly concern.
What particularly rouses them is the heroine's love affairs. They could listen to them all day.
They yearn to hear what she said to him and to be told what he replied to her, and they repeat it to each other.
In our own love-sick days we often used to go and relate to various people all the touching conversations that took place between our lady-love and ourselves; but our friends never seemed to get excited over it. On the contrary, a casual observer might even have been led to the idea that they were bored by our recital. And they had trains to catch and men to meet before we had got a quarter through the job.
Ah, how often in those days have we yearned for the sympathy of a stage peasantry, who would have crowded round us, eager not to miss one word of the thrilling narrative, who would have rejoiced with us with an encouraging laugh, and have condoled with us with a grieved "Oh," and who would have gone off, when we had had enough of them, singing about it.
By the way, this is a very beautiful trait in the character of the stage peasantry, their prompt and unquestioning compliance with the slightest wish of any of the principals.
"Leave me, friends," says the heroine, beginning to make preparations for weeping, and before she can turn round they are clean gone – one lot to the right, evidently making for the back entrance of the public-house, and the other half to the left, where they visibly hide themselves behind the pump and wait till somebody else wants them.
The stage peasantry do not talk much, their strong point being to listen. When they cannot get any more information about the state of the heroine's heart, they like to be told long and complicated stories about wrongs done years ago to people that they never heard of. They seem to be able to grasp and understand these stories with ease. This makes the audience envious of them.
When the stage peasantry do talk, however, they soon make up for lost time. They start off all together with a suddenness that nearly knocks you over.
They all talk. Nobody listens. Watch any two of them. They are both talking as hard as they can go. They have been listening quite enough to other people: you can't expect them to listen to each other. But the conversation under such conditions must be very trying.
And then they flirt so sweetly! so idyllicly!
It has been our privilege to see real peasantry flirt, and it has always struck us as a singularly solid and substantial affair – makes one think, somehow, of a steam-roller flirting with a cow – but on the stage it is so sylph-like. She has short skirts, and her stockings are so much tidier and better fitting than these things are in real peasant life, and she is arch and coy. She turns away from him and laughs – such a silvery laugh. And he is ruddy and curly haired and has on such a beautiful waistcoat! how can she help but love him? And he is so tender and devoted and holds her by the waist; and she slips round and comes up the other side. Oh, it is so bewitching!
The stage peasantry like to do their love-making as much in public as possible. Some people fancy a place all to themselves for this sort of thing – where nobody else is about. We ourselves do. But the stage peasant is more sociably inclined. Give him the village green, just outside the public-house, or the square on market-day to do his spooning in.
They are very faithful, are stage peasants. No jilting, no fickleness, no breach of promise. If the gentleman in pink walks out with the lady in blue in the first act, pink and blue will be married in the end. He sticks to her all through and she sticks to him.
Girls in yellow may come and go, girls in green may laugh and dance – the gentleman in pink heeds them not. Blue is his color, and he never leaves it. He stands beside it, he sits beside it. He drinks with her, he smiles with her, he laughs with her, he dances with her, he comes on with her, he goes off with her.
When the time comes for talking he talks to her and only her, and she talks to him and only him. Thus there is no jealousy, no quarreling. But we should prefer an occasional change ourselves.
There are no married people in stage villages and no children (consequently, of course – happy village! oh, to discover it and spend a month there!). There are just the same number of men as there are women in all stage villages, and they are all about the same age and each young man loves some young woman. But they never marry.
They talk a lot about it, but they never do it. The artful beggars! They see too much what it's like among the principals.
The stage peasant is fond of drinking, and when he drinks he likes to let you know he is drinking. None of your quiet half-pint inside the bar for him. He likes to come out in the street and sing about it and do tricks with it, such as turning it topsy-turvy over his head.
Notwithstanding all this he is moderate, mind you. You can't say he takes too much. One small jug of ale among forty is his usual allowance.
He has a keen sense of humor and is easily amused. There is something almost pathetic about the way he goes into convulsions of laughter over such very small jokes. How a man like that would enjoy a real joke! One day he will perhaps hear a real joke. Who knows? It will, however, probably kill him. One grows to love the stage peasant after awhile. He is so good, so child-like, so unworldly. He realizes one's ideal of Christianity.