KATE CLAXTON.
The sailor who braves the dangers of the deep is always blindly superstitious. There is something in the vastness of the ocean, in its misty immensity, in its magic mirage, its wonders and its terrors, that puzzles the mind and sets fire to the imagination of poor Jack, and even bewilders his superior officers. The artist who undertakes to sail before the public and to amuse it for a living is quite as much at sea as your genuine Jack Tar. He or she finds himself or herself on a veritable ocean, beset by dangers, surrounded by unknown and fickle conditions of atmosphere and phenomena. All the logic of the dry land is of no avail in such a situation. The relations of cause and effect are broken up. Magic is the only excuse for the arrival of the unexpected. The seemingly impossible in results is always the most possible. Once embarked in the dramatic sea, no one can tell where the voyage may end, or what it may bring forth. A shipwreck on auriferous rocks may prove a success.
Triumph may come from ruin; happiness from danger, and the longest voyage and the richest freight are often given the most leaky and shallow craft. There is no knowing which boat will float the longest on the dramatic sea—the best equipped or the most shaky and flimsy. So it is no wonder that actors are all superstitious. They have no compass even to guide them when beset by the varying winds of public opinion. The impossible is always sure to meet them; so they are always on the lookout for magic, and depend in secret quite as much upon their simple necromancy as upon their talent or their study. Every star has, so to speak, a fetich that insures success, or goes through an imaginary formula to invoke prosperity. The public is constantly under the influence of the voudoo arts of actors, and incantations and mystic signs rule the world of Thespis and enslave the public without its knowledge. Some of these fancies and formulæ of intelligent actors are, indeed, more simple and childlike than those that characterize poor Jack of the briny deep.
Imagine, for instance, an actor like John McCullough refusing to approach a theatre except by one route (the one he first takes, no matter how roundabout) from night to night, for fear of breaking the charm of success. Imagine, too, a lot of other trifling things that beset him—signs, omens and the like. If he stumbles when he first enters a scene it is a sign of good luck. If he receives faint applause in the first scene he is sure to succeed, amid thunderous plaudits, in the last; if Forrest's sword, used in the Gladiator, becomes dim by damp air or other cause, it is a sign of lack of fervor in the audience of the evening, while, on the contrary an extraordinary brightness of the weapon is a sure sign of great success. If a negro should cross his path while he is on his way to a performance, that is a never-failing omen of a prosperous engagement, while to encounter a cross-eyed woman (not a man, for strabismus in that sort of creature does not affect John, probably because it is only the woman he looks at), is a sure sign if not of failure, at least of annoyance to himself and coldness on the part of his audience. The Macbeth music is, of course, his great bugbear, as it is with all actors.
THE LATE VENIE CLANCIE.
No success could attend any of his performances if any one were to hum or whistle the witches' chorus in the wings or the dressing-rooms. Any poor, inexperienced devil who might try it would find John, and, in fact, all the company, wrestling with him, and himself lying in the gutter at the back door before he had warbled through two bars of the fatal music. This is, in the opinion of every actor, a sure invocation of disaster. Under the malign influence of this melodic devilishness either the theatre will be burned down (for, if we are to believe the actors and stage tradition, every theatre that was ever burned in this country was put under the spell of fire by some singer or whistler of the witches' chorus), or salaries will not be paid, or the manager will bring his season to an early and disastrous end. Something ill is sure to happen if the Macbeth music is heard, and John shares that belief in common with even the humblest Roman of them all who parades his scraggy shanks nightly in ridiculous contrast with the heroic legs of the tragedian.
John T. Raymond, while believing faithfully in all the regular signs and omens of the stage, has his own special claims to "hog 'em," using the stage vernacular. He has only one suit of clothes for Colonel Sellers, and would not have any other under any circumstances. It would change his luck from good to bad.