IV
The mot de caractère, the word or the sentence whereby a character expresses himself unconsciously, “giving himself away,” as the American phrase is, this is not to be confounded with that ancient stage-trick, the catch-word, repeated again and again with the hope and expectation that it will become more laughable the more often it is heard. The catch-word may be effective when it is used with artful discretion; but it is a dangerous device likely at last to annoy a large part of the audience. Since Corporal Nym companions Falstaff in the ‘Merry Wives’ as well as in ‘Henry IV’ we may infer that he had found favor in the eyes of the spectators at the Globe, or else Shakspere would not have carried him over from play to play; and yet modern audiences soon weary of Nym’s inability to open his mouth without letting fall the word humor. “That’s the humor of it” is not at all humorous to-day.
But even the catch-word, said once and said again, and then said yet once more, may be made to serve as a mot de caractère, as a revelation of character. In Molière’s ‘Fourberies de Scapin,’ when the befooled father is told that his beloved son has rashly adventured himself on board a Turkish galley and has been seized and held for ransom, his reiterated query,—“But what the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is increasingly mirth-provoking because it is exactly the futile protest which that foolish parent would put forth again and again in that particular predicament.
In itself the question,—“What the devil was he doing on that galley?”—is not at all funny; it becomes funny only because of its utterance at a given moment by a given person. It is not quotable by itself, since it is meaningless when detached from its context. Nor is there anything funny in the remark, “It is at least as long since I was in a bank!” or in the query, “Why don’t you?” None the less have I heard the remark and the query arouse abundant laughter.
When David Warfield played the part of a stage-Jew in one of the Weber and Fields nondescript spectacles, cleverly compounded of glitter and gaiety, he had a brief dialog with a subordinate stage-Jew. This feeder explained in detail how he had taken out a fire insurance policy on his store and on his stock in trade for at least twice their value. When Warfield heard this, he looked puzzled for a moment and then he asked, “Vel, vy don’t you?”
The elder Sothern took an unsuccessful comedy of H. J. Byron’s, the ‘Prompter’s Box,’ renamed it the ‘Crushed Tragedian’ and rewrote it so that he might himself appear as a broken-down old actor, fallen upon evil days but forever puffed with pride in his own histrionic achievements. He comes in contact with a banker, who, when he learns that Sothern is an actor, makes the remark that “It must be ten years since I was in a theater.” Whereupon the crushed tragedian, drawing himself up and draping himself in imaginary robes, delivers the annihilating retort, “It must be at least as long since I was in a bank!”
It is a little difficult to decide whether these two examples illustrate the mot de caractère or the mot de situation, since they illuminate both character and situation. But the mot de situation can exist independently, relying for its effect solely upon the moment in the action when it is spoken. In a forgotten farce called ‘French Flats,’ Stuart Robson was warned to keep out of the way of a certain tenor, who was fiercely and fierily jealous. A little later we saw him venture into a room wherein we knew the operatic Othello to be concealed; and when he reappeared with his clothes torn from him and with a woe-begone expression, we waited expectantly for him to explain,—“The tenor was behind the door.” This sentence, innocent of all humor when taken by itself apart from the situation, was only the eagerly looked for explosion of a bomb fired by the long fuse which has been sputtering in full sight of the spectators.