It is a tribute to our human passion for pretending. His Excellency stands in the reception hall at Government House and laughingly welcomes his guests. They are pretenders, every one. The troubadour is no troubadour; the viking, no viking; the gipsy, no gipsy; and the milkmaid, no milkmaid. They are just pretending and they have gone to all this trouble and to all this expense that the full-orbed joy of pretending may be for one crowded hour their own. And the other people—the gentlemen in evening dress; the ladies richly begowned and bejewelled; the surging crowd upon the path. They are making their way to the theatres. They are going to see the great actors and actresses pretend. One actor will pretend to be a cripple and another will pretend to be a king; one actress will pretend to be an empress and one will pretend to be a slave; and the better the actors and the actresses pretend the better these people will like it.
For the people love pretending; that is how the theatre came to be. Like Topsy, it had no father and no mother. It sprang from our insatiable fondness for make-believe. In his Short History of the English People John Richard Green says that 'it was the people itself that created the stage'; and he graphically describes their initial ventures. 'The theatre,' he says, 'was the courtyard of an inn or a mere booth such as is still seen at a country fair; the bulk of the audience sat beneath the open sky; a few covered seats accommodated the wealthier spectators while patrons and nobles sprawled upon the actual boards.' In those days the audience had to do its part of the pretending. If the spectators saw a few flowers they accepted the hint and imagined that the play was being enacted in a beautiful garden. In a battle scene the arrival of an army was represented by a stampede across the stage of a dozen clumsy sceneshifters brandishing swords and bucklers. In order to assist the audience to muster appropriate emotions, the stage was draped with black when a tragedy was about to be presented and with blue when the performance was to portray life in some lighter vein. What is this but a group of children playing at charades, at dressing-up, at 'just pretending?' Children pretend in order that they may escape from the limitations of reality into the infinitudes of romance. Once they begin to pretend all life is open to them. They have uttered the magic 'Sesame' and every gate unbars. Their seniors invade the same realm for the same reason. This is the significance of those crowded streets last night.
III
Now this brings me to a very interesting point. Is it wrong to pretend? In the greatest sermon ever preached—the Sermon on the Mount—Jesus called certain people hypocrites. But, did He, by doing so, condemn all forms of hypocrisy? If so, the people upon whom I looked last night were all of them earning for themselves His malediction. And so were the people gathered in the quaint old English courtyard. And so was Jean when she called to her playmates: 'Let's pretend!' And so was 'the old, old, old, old lady' and 'the boy with the twisted knee.' For a hypocrite—as the very word suggests—is simply a pretender. A hypocrite is one who colors his face, or dresses up or acts a part. Does it follow, therefore, because Jesus condemned the Pharisees and called them hypocrites, that all pretenders fall beneath His frown? To ask the question is to answer it. Fancy Jesus frowning at Jean! Fancy Jesus frowning at 'the old, old, old, old lady' and 'the boy with the twisted knee!' Why Jesus Himself pretended on occasions. He behaved towards the Syro-Phœnician woman as though He had no sympathy with her in her distress. He saw the disciples in trouble on the lake; and, walking on the water, He made as though He would have passed them by. When, after journeying with two of His disciples to Emmaus, He reached the door of their home, He made as though He would have gone further! 'He made as though!' 'He made as though!' 'He made as though!' The feints of Deity!
Let a man but keep his eyes wide open and he will see some very lovable hypocrites, some very amiable pretenders, in the course of a day's march. I have been reading The Butterfly Man. And here in the early part of the book is a scene in which a child and a criminal take part. Mary Virginia shows John Flint a pasteboard box. It contains a dark-colored and rather ugly grey moth with his wings turned down.
'You wouldn't think him pretty, would you?' asked the child.
'No,' replied John Flint disappointedly, 'I shouldn't!'
Mary Virginia smiled, and, picking up the little moth, held his body, very gently, between her finger tips. He fluttered, spreading out his grey wings; and then John saw the beautiful pansy-like underwings, and the glorious lower pair of scarlet velvet, barred and bordered with black.
'I got to thinking,' said the girl, thoughtfully, lifting her clear and candid eyes to John Flint's, 'I got to thinking, when he threw aside his plain grey cloak and showed me his lovely underwings, that he's like some people. You couldn't be expected to know what was underneath, could you? So you pass them by, thinking how ordinary and uninteresting and ugly they are, and you feel rather sorry for them—because you don't know. But if you once get close enough to touch them—why, then you find out! You only think of the dust-colored outside, and all the while the underwings are right there, waiting for you to find them! Isn't it wonderful and beautiful? And the best of it all is, it's true!'
In these artless sentences, tripping, so easily from a child's tongue, Marie Oemler sums up the burden of her book. The incident is a parable. For John Flint was himself the drab and ugly moth. In the opening chapters of the story, he is a horrible object—coarse, brutal, loathsome, revolting. But there were underwings. And gradually, beneath the touch of gentle influences, those underwings became visible; and, in the later stages of the story, all men admired and revered and loved the beautiful nobleness of the Butterfly Man.