The Prodigal Son belongs in our list, and Andrew Jackson, and Lot's wife, and Eddie Rickenbacker, and Lord Jim, and Ajax, and Little Red Riding Hood, and Thomas Edison, and the father of the Katzenjammer Kids, and most of Bluebeard's wives and all the people who refused to go into the ark.
While we are willing to admit that there are other types who are successfully romantic, in spite of self-consciousness, they are the exceptions. We are hardly willing to accept them in a group. This brings us to Mrs. Fiske's new play, Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans, at which we have been aiming throughout the article.
There are nine characters in the play, and the author pictures each of them as being distinctly aware that he is an adventurous character, in a quaint garden, in a romantic city, in a mad story. It is true that these people do some romantic and adventurous things, but never without first predicting that they are going to be romantic, and then explaining after it is all over that they have been romantic. From our point of view there is too much challenge in this. Whenever a man or woman in a play or in life promises that he is about to do something quaint we have an irresistible desire to lay him 6 to 5 that it won't be any such thing. Then if the decision is left to us we always decide against him.
The method of the preliminary puff and the subsequent official confirmation is decidedly a mistake in the case of the character portrayed by Mrs. Fiske in Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans. Mrs. Fiske showed herself quite capable of carrying the rôle of a spirited, romantic and adventurous belle, and it was unnecessary to have her triumph so carefully prepared in advance by the predictions of her servants as to what she would do when she "got her Jim Crow up."
We might have been content to accept some of the other characters as sure enough romantic figures if they had not been so confoundedly confident that they were. They fairly challenged us into disbelief. The author, to our mind, was wrong from the beginning in describing his comedy on the program as a comedy of "moonshine, madness and make-believe." Moonshine and madness are both elusive stage qualities. An author is fortunate indeed if he can achieve them. He is foolish to take the risk of predicting them. If he succeeds in presenting authentic moonshine and madness he will not need to inform the audience of the fact by means of the program and still less through his characters. Mis' Nelly, of N'Orleans left us much more convinced of the make-believe.
A play which affected us in somewhat similar fashion was The Gipsy Trail, produced here a season or so ago. In this play the author presented a character who seemed to be a truly romantic figure for at least half the play. Then he was suddenly trapped into a confession that he was romantic. Somebody asked him about it, and, most unfortunately, he set out to prove that he was an adventurer in a long speech beginning "I have fried eggs on top of the Andes" or in some such manner, and from that moment we grew away from him. We knew him as no true adventurer, but as a man who would eventually write a book or at best a series of articles for a Sunday magazine.
The real tragedy of romance is that any man who appreciates his own loses it. In this workaday world we can live only by taking in the other fellow's adventures.
A Robe for the King
Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a story about the tailors who made a suit for a King out of a magic cloth. The quality of the cloth was such, so the tailors said, that it could be seen by nobody who was not worthy of the position he held. And so all the people at court declared that they could see the cloth and admired it greatly, but when the King went out to walk a little boy cried: "Why, he hasn't got anything on." Then everybody took up the cry, and the King rushed back to his palace, and the two tailors were banished in disgrace. Information has recently been discovered which casts new light on the story. According to this information there was only one tailor, and his adventure with the King was about as follows:
AN IMPERIAL FOOTMAN—There's a man at the gate who says he's a tailor and that he wants to see your majesty.