Scenes and costumes are designed without due consideration of the fact that they are to be before our eyes for a long time. Occasionally we are pleased by a striking picture for five minutes, during which the play is forgotten; then the play asserts itself and the money spent on the mounting ceases to bear fruit, and a little later on the vivid spectacular effect, charming for five minutes, becomes trying by reason of its quality, and it reasserts itself aggressively, to the hurt of the play. We have gorgeous costumes which, when first presented and grouped, produce beautiful effects; afterwards costumes inharmonious with them are introduced, the grouping is altered, and the colour-scheme destroyed; then the question comes into mind, How is it that all these characters have brand-new costumes, although the circumstances of the drama show that most of the dresses would be torn or dirty or faded? It may be an answer that this convention is so firmly established as not to be absurd; but the convention is constantly violated where it would be too blatantly ridiculous by somebody presenting himself with torn or dirtied or faded costume. How much more beautiful as a rule the costumes become after the play has run a while!
From the colour point of view, it was the blessing of the romantic period that the ruck and run of people had to wear their velvets and silks and satins till time and wear and tear had toned down and harmonized the colours. It must be remembered, too, that in the evening they were seen under favourable circumstances, for the lights and shades must have been strong, although the lighting was feeble before the use of gas was discovered and before the oil-wells were found that have made half the population of the United States slaves to a few plutocrats.
Also, "shoddy" had not been invented, nor had coal-tar dyes been discovered by the English and exploited by the Germans now groaning over the wise tyranny of the provisions of the new Patent Act, to which ignorant people have applied the offensive term "Protectionist." Shoddy treated with aniline dyes can produce effects that overwhelm the colours of the honest old materials which owed their hues to the efforts of the vegetable and the insect. A modern manufacturer is proud when his scarlet shoddy shrieks like a steam siren. Unfortunately some of the managers seem to like the shriek.
[Stage Meals ]
An undistinguished foreigner from France was talking the other day about the English stage, of which apparently he had seen a good deal. After being asked many searching questions put in the hopes of eliciting material for "copy" it was discovered that what he most admired in our theatre is the way in which stage meals are treated. In the first place, he was astonished at the "exquisite distinction" displayed by the players in eating them. The "perfect elegance" which one actress exhibited in consuming an egg had fascinated him and he stated with conviction that he could have spent a happy evening simply watching her eat these ill-starred hopes of chickens. It was pointed out that the management could hardly afford to pay her a sufficient salary for the strain on her digestive faculties, and also that the eggs—real Boat Race eggs, not election missiles—cost something.
He is quite an undistinguished person and utterly bourgeois, though he has written some successful funny farces which as yet have not suffered the dishonour of adaptation, and during his many visits to London has acquired an even more perfect ignorance of the English and their ways than if he had never paid tribute to Neptune; for he always stays at a little French hotel where there is absolutely nothing British, not even the meat or the matches or the washing arrangements.
Now, if there is one matter of manners in which we are better than the people of the Continent it is in our mode of eating. How this has come about it is difficult to say. One knows that good French families sometimes engage English nursery governesses in order that the children may be brought up to feed themselves daintily, and that people in good society on the other side of the streak certainly commit acts at dinner which are rather ugly. Goodness knows what is the reason. Possibly the cynic would discover in our greater refinement a curious form of snobbishness, the sort of timidity about accomplishing before other people a natural function which in other aspects of life is certainly carried too far by us.
We have an extraordinary amount of eating nowadays upon the stage, managed very badly. In the old days, when people got through a banquet, consisting chiefly of a special brand of cardboard chicken, a real dîner à la carte at the present time only used in pantomime, washed down by copious draughts of nothing from gilded papier-maché goblets which refuse to make the chink of metal, and spent no more than five minutes over the whole affair, it was recognized that the banquet was a mere convention; nobody pretended to believe in any aspect of it, and therefore no one questioned its verisimilitude.
In the twentieth century real food is consumed, the diet being chiefly vegetarian, and damp decoctions are drunk with gusto. Occasionally, it is said, Persian sherbet, or lemon kali, once joys of our youth, give a theatrical fizziness to toast and water in bottles with deceitful lordly labels. Unfortunately, except in The Man from Blankley's, these real things are consumed as fast as a midday meal at an American boarding-house, with the result that they are a mixture of realism and convention profoundly unconvincing. Art would be better served by the old-fashioned method, for the playgoer is more willing to concede a whole than a half "make-belief."
One amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the French is that not only are the names abominably mispronounced—which can hardly be avoided—but that the efforts at representing the foreign feeding as a rule are all wrong. Simili-champagne is consumed where no Frenchman would dream of drinking "fizz," for across the Channel the detestable snobbishness of the English in relation to champagne is imitated chiefly by the modern plutocracy and by the prosperous members of what is alleged to be the most ancient, if hardly the most honourable, of professions. When we see a French company in a play, the leading lady solemnly wipes the inside of her glass with her napkin, occasionally goes a little further and breathes into it—breathes rather dampishly. In the subsequent English version the leading actress is far too much of a lady to do anything of the kind. The foreigners cut up everything on their plates, clean their knives upon the bread, sometimes before and sometimes afterwards scooping out the salt with them, and then lay them by for the next dish. Of course the English company is not guilty of such solecisms.