“By Jove! I think you’ve hit it,” said Mr. Flippance, more gloomily than ever. “They take the standard of drama—not of mechanical miracles. And that’s why they applaud most at the easiest effects, just shouting and blood and thunder, and that’s why I’m sick, I mean, why Polly is sick of the whole business. Take our tight-rope dancer now. I don’t say she’s as graceful as a live dancer at Richardson’s, or pirouettes like the Cairo Contortionist of my young days at Vauxhall. But she’s far more wonderful. A live tight-rope dancer can, after all, only fall downwards if she makes a slip. But ours, instead of tumbling down, might fly up like a balloon, or even just miss the tight-rope and dance on nothing like you see a murderer at Newgate. But the public take the standard of the ballet or the queens of the tight-rope, and instead of giving us a hand for the cleverness in the making and dressing of the puppet, and another hand for the putting life into it, and a third hand for the dexterity of the manipulation, there’s times when we get no more recognition than if ’twas a monkey-on-a-stick. I tried to educate ’em by letting ’em see the strings or the wires—I mustn’t tell an outsider what they are exactly—I flooded my stage with light. Duke, now, used to keep his scene particularly dark with the fantoccini.”
“What’s fantokeeny?” asked Jinny, imitating his mispronunciation as best she could.
“They’re the figures that are more mechanism than character—balancers, pole-carriers, stilt-walkers, spiral ascensionists, and this tight-rope dancer I’m telling you of. Duke’s idea was to keep the mechanism dark.”
“That seems to me best,” said Jinny.
“I don’t agree,” said Mr. Flippance. “There’s the scenic effects to consider. Darken your scene and you hide it.”
“But if you light it, you show up the way it’s done,” Jinny urged.
“Unless you show ’em the way it’s done, how can they appreciate the way you do it? But there, I’m done with it! Let Duke have his pony. Polly shall tread the boards once more.”
“Does he want you to give him a pony then to change back?”
“That’s it, the son of a Shylock.”
“Then you will want a horse after all?”