This sort of man is rather trying in real life. In real life such a man would probably be slaughtered to death and buried at an early period of his career, but on the stage they put up with him.
He is very good, is the comic man. He can't bear villainy. To thwart villainy is his life's ambition, and in this noble object fortune backs him up grandly. Bad people come and commit their murders and thefts right under his nose, so that he can denounce them in the last act.
They never see him there, standing close beside them, while they are performing these fearful crimes.
It is marvelous how short-sighted people on the stage are. We always thought that the young lady in real life was moderately good at not seeing folks she did not want to when they were standing straight in front of her, but her affliction in this direction is as nothing compared with that of her brothers and sisters on the stage.
These unfortunate people come into rooms where there are crowds of people about—people that it is most important that they should see, and owing to not seeing whom they get themselves into fearful trouble, and they never notice any of them. They talk to somebody opposite, and they can't see a third person that is standing bang between the two of them.
You might fancy they wore blinkers.
Then, again, their hearing is so terribly weak. It really ought to be seen to. People talk and chatter at the very top of their voices close behind them, and they never hear a word—don't know anybody's there, even. After it has been going on for half an hour, and the people "up stage" have made themselves hoarse with shouting, and somebody has been boisterously murdered and all the furniture upset, then the people "down stage" "think they hear a noise."
The comic man always rows with his wife if he is married or with his sweetheart if he is not married. They quarrel all day long. It must be a trying life, you would think, but they appear to like it.
How the comic man lives and supports his wife (she looks as if it wanted something to support her, too) and family is always a mystery to us. As we have said, he is not a rich man and he never seems to earn any money. Sometimes he keeps a shop, and in the way he manages business it must be an expensive thing to keep, for he never charges anybody for anything, he is so generous. All his customers seem to be people more or less in trouble, and he can't find it in his heart to ask them to pay for their goods under such distressing circumstances.
He stuffs their basket full with twice as much as they came to buy, pushes their money back into their hands, and wipes away a tear.