M. C. KRAUSS
Germany, however, possesses two newspapers for the banquistes: one, under a French title, La Revue; the other, which is far the most important, is called Der Artist. The complete sub-title is: Central-Organ zur Vermittlung des Verkehrs zwischen Directoren und Künstlern der Circus, Varietebühnen, reisenden Theater und Schaustellungen. This paper is printed at Düsseldorf; M. C. Krauss is the chief editor.
Der Artist has been established six years. It looks like a weekly review of twenty leaves, printed in three columns. A woodcut, which fills the frontispiece and all the left side of the first page, represents various scenes from the circus [p008] and theatres: “shootists” breaking bottles, horses leaping over bars, pretty equestrians on their highly-trained steeds, tame lions, dwarfs, giants, clowns,—all the attractions of the circus and fair.
Here, as in the Era, we find long alphabetical enumerations of travelling and stationary establishments and lists of addresses of artists engaged or disengaged. These advertisements are nearly all compiled in an extraordinary gibberish, which far surpasses the ingenuity of the “sabir”: here is a specimen of them, the first I met with. It is a curious mixture of French, English, Latin, Italian, and German words:
MISS ADRIENNE ANCIOU, la reine de l’air, la plus grande Équilibriste aérienne de l’Époque,—Nec plus ultra—senza Rival, frei ab August 1888, 28 East 4. Str. New York.
It is very remarkable that English and American puffing has quite disappeared here. The earnestness and application of the German character are betrayed even in the typographical arrangement of this newspaper for acrobats. It is as clearly and carefully printed as a catalogue of the Leipzic libraries. The biographical notices, announcements of death, column of accidents, the Varietebühnen are compiled with scrupulous care and exactitude. This curious publication even finds space for literature, and the last number of the Artist published as a supplement Damons Walten, a novel, by Otto von Ellendorf. It is easy to appreciate the services which these and similar newspapers are able to confer upon the banquistes.
“To tell the truth,” one of the confraternity said to me one [p010] day, “in the whole world we have no other home but the little pigeon-hole of advertisements, where those who know us go and ask for news of us, where they learn the history of our engagements, our successes, our accidents, our marriage, the birth of our children, or the tidings of our death.”
Between the artist who seeks for an engagement and the manager always on the look out for an extraordinary “novelty,” a third person necessarily intervenes, the middleman, who arises everywhere between buyer and seller.
And, in fact, at the present time all the principal cities of the world have their agents for performing artists of every kind. These personages are very important, and make large profits. Those best known on the Continent are Messrs. Paravicini and Warner, of London; Hitzig and Wulff, of Berlin; Wild, of Vienna; Rosinsky, of Paris; Nael Salsbury, of New York, who, during the Exhibition of 1889, has shown the Parisians the savage life of the “Wild West,” transported to Paris in the persons of the celebrated Buffalo-Bill and his Indians.