In time there came to be spoken words accompanying those sung, and thus the “vaudeville” expanded slowly into a little comic play in which there were one or more songs. Of late the Parisian “vaudeville” has been not unlike the London “musical farce.” At no stage of its career had the “vaudeville” anything to do with the “variety show”; and yet to the average American to-day the two words seem synonymous. There was even organized in New York, in the fall of 1892, a series of subscription suppers during which “specialty entertainments” were to be given; and in spite of the fact that the organizers were presumably persons who had traveled, they called their society the “Vaudeville Club,” altho no real “vaudeville” was ever presented before the members during its brief and inglorious career. Of course explanation and protest are now equally futile. The meaning of the word is forever warped beyond correction; and for the future here in America a “vaudeville performance” is a “variety show,” no matter what it may be or may have been in France. When the people as a whole accept a word as having a certain meaning, that is and must be the meaning of the word thereafter; and there is no use in kicking against the pricks.
The fate in English of another French term is even now trembling in the balance. This is the word née. The French have found a way out of the difficulty of indicating easily the maiden name of a married woman; they write unhesitatingly about Madame Machin, née Chose; and the Germans have a like idiom. But instead of taking a hint from the French and the Germans, and thus of speaking about Mrs. Brown, born Gray, as they do, not a few English writers have simply borrowed the actual French word, and so we read about Mrs. Black, née White. As usual, this borrowing is dangerous; and the temptation seems to be irresistible to destroy the exact meaning of née by using it in the sense of “formerly.” Thus in the ‘Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-88,’ collected and arranged by Mr. George W. E. Russell, the editor supplies in foot-notes information about the persons whose names appear in the correspondence. In one of these annotations we read that the wife of Sir Anthony de Rothschild was “née Louisa Montefiore” (i. 165), and in another that the Hon. Mrs. Eliot Yorke was “née Annie de Rothschild” (ii. 160). Now, neither of these ladies was born with a given name as well as a family name. It is obvious that the editor has chosen arbitrarily to wrench the meaning of née to suit his own convenience, a proceeding of which I venture to think that Matthew Arnold himself would certainly have disapproved. In fact, I doubt if Mr. Russell is not here guilty of an absurdity almost as obvious as that charged against a wealthy western lady now residing at the capital of the United States, who is said to have written her name on the register of a New York hotel thus: “Mrs. Blank, Washington, née Chicago.”
Why is it that the wandering stars of the theatrical firmament are wont to display themselves in a répertoire when it would be so much easier for them to make use of a repertory? And why does the teacher of young and ambitious singers insist on calling his school a conservatoire when it would assert its rank just as well if it was known as a conservatory? What strange freak of chance has led so many of the women who have made themselves masters of the technic of the piano to announce themselves as pianistes in the vain belief that pianiste is the feminine of pianist? How comes it that a man capable of composing so scholarly a book as the ‘Greek Drama’ of Mr. Lionel D. Barnett really is should be guilty of saying that certain declamations in the later theater “were adapted to the style of popular artistes”? And why does Mr. Andrew Lang (in his ‘Angling Sketches’) write about the asphalte, when the obvious English is either asphalt or asphaltum?
And yet Mr. Lang, himself convicted of this dereliction, has no hesitation in objecting to a “delightful grammatical form which closes a scene in one of the new rag-bag journals. The author gets his characters off the stage with the announcement: ‘They exit.’ He seems to think that exit is a verb. I exit, he exits, they exit. It would be interesting to learn how he translates exeunt omnes. One is accustomed to ‘a penetralia’ from young lions, and to ‘a strata,’ but ‘they exit’ is original.”
But the verb to exit is not original with the writer in the new rag-bag journal. It has been current in England for three quarters of a century at least, and it can be found in the pages of that vigorously written pair of volumes, Mrs. Trollope’s ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans’ (published in 1831), in the picturesque passage in which she describes how the American women, left alone, “all console themselves together for whatever they may have suffered in keeping awake by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe-cake, johnny-cake, waffle-cake and dodger-cake, pickled peaches and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung-beef, apple-sauce, and pickled oysters, than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world. After this massive meal is over, they return to the drawing-room, and it always appeared to me that they remained together as long as they could bear it, and then they rise en masse, cloak, bonnet, shawl, and exit.”
The verb to exit, with the full conjugation Mr. Lang thought so strange, has long been common among theatrical folk. The stage-manager will tell the leading lady “You exit here, and she exits up left.” The theatrical folk, who probably first brought the verb into use, did not borrow it from the Latin, as Mr. Lang seems to suppose; they simply made a verb of the existing English noun exit, meaning a way out. We old New-Yorkers who can recall the time when Barnum’s Museum stood at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, remember also the signs which used to declare
THIS WAY
TO THE
GRAND EXIT
and we have not forgotten the facile anecdote of the countryman who went wonderingly to discover what manner of strange beast the “exit” might be, and who unexpectedly found himself in the street outside.