WE should be much grieved were we to let a chance of immortality at our hands go by, for our great friend the prompter—the suggeritore of the Italians. The prompter is to the opera, what the fifth wheel is to a wagon; everything rubs, grates and abrades it, yet the whole concern turns on it. He is the most abused (not hated—that is reserved for the Impresario,) man in the company. But he does not care for it. That is what he is hired for. He is paid to be of a good temper, and he does it. He returns docility for dollars; and suavity for salary. He is the true philosopher; just enough in the company to be part of it, and sufficiently detached to avoid all the squabbles and bickerings. He, however, is the victim of all the caprices of the company, from the prima donna, who in a miff kicks about his partition in a very piano cavatina, to each of the bandy-legged choristers. True, he has his little revenge. This he accomplishes by using his voice too much and too loudly in the sotto voce parts, so that all the duos become trios and the quintettes, choruses. This is little enough to sweeten the embitterments of a suggeritore's life, but such it is, and he is contented. The suggeritore must be a thin man. It does not require a Paxton to know that a hole in the stage two feet square, will not hold Barnum's obesities. He must also be short and supple-necked, to allow the green fungus which excresces from the stage to cover him; and he must be the fortunate owner of a right arm as untiring as a locomotive crank or the sails of a windmill. It is a prevalent but mistaken idea, that the prompter is an impolite man; we happen to know that it is a matter of the deepest concern with him to be obliged to sit with his back to the audience. But he is like the angels and St. Cecilia, "Il n'avait pas de quoi" to do otherwise. Operas must be, Singers must have, a lead horse—(N. B. How can delicate females and tenors be expected to recollect "les paroles;")—and there he is, with a little hole in the back of his calash for the leader of the orchestra to stir him up when the excitement becomes very strong, and the time is irrecoverably lost. As to the social habits of the suggeritore, the naturalist is at a loss, for he immediately disappears after rehearsal, and remains in close retirement till the performance, after which he is again lost till the next day.
CHAPTER VII.
"A neat, snug study on a winter's night;
A book, friend, single lady, or a glass
Of claret, sandwich, and an appetite,
Are things which make an English evening pass,
Though certes by no means so grand a sight,
As is a theatre, lit up with gas."—Byron.
THE night is a cold one; the snow is falling in large, heavy flakes, and those who are fond of the frigid, but exhilarating amusement of sleighing, are in hopes that by the morrow they will be able to pass like lightning from one part of the city to the other; in a sleigh decked with warm, gaily trimmed furs; filled with a merry company, and drawn by two high-headed, dashing trotters. The gas lights are just discernible from corner to corner. The number of people in the streets is steadily decreasing, and the sound of their foot-fall is muffled in the snow. About the theatres and the opera house, however, crowds of the idle and curious, gaping at those who are entering these buildings, make it necessary for the police to pace to and fro, ordering back the more presumptuous loiterers, who press forward and obstruct the approach to the doors.
Query? Why does the crowd always stare at those who are going into a theatre or opera? The latter are attired somewhat strangely to be sure, but still they don't look exactly like Choctaws.
The cab and chaise-men muffled up in their cold-defying great-coats and woolen comforters, are opening the doors of their several vehicles, out of which ladies enveloped in cloaks and hoods are dismounting under cover of umbrellas, held probably by the "best of brothers," but more probably by gentlemen in no way related to them. In the opera house all is bustle and commotion. The officials are selling tickets, receiving tickets, and directing to their places bevies of ladies and gentlemen bewildered in a maze of passages. The audience is impatiently preparing itself for a delightful evening's entertainment. The dandies, who are so unfortunate as not to have accompanied ladies have already brought themselves up to the attack, and have levelled their opera-glasses on all the points where they know well-established objects of admiration are likely to be found. Now and then they bow their recognition in a reserved inclination, or in a careless smiling way that bespeaks the freedom of familiar intimacy.
The fast-men are standing at the doors in knots of three and four, talking over the last trot of Suffolk, or the probable chance of victory in the next day's dog-fight, and making a few, no doubt very fast, but not very proper allusions to the shoulders of some rather sparingly habited belles. The Cubans in the parquette, who, by the by, during their sojourn in this country will best preserve their liberty by remaining north of Mason and Dixon's line, are clearing their voices in very doubtful Spanish, for those animated bravos, which we must admit they always administer in the very best taste, both as to time and quantity. Here and there, some lone young man, desolate in a crowd, who has seldom before been exposed to the full blaze of the all-discovering gas light, not exactly knowing what to do with himself, is endeavouring, with a fictitious indifference, to fill up the vacancies of attention by smoothing down the stubborn folds of badly selected white kids. Five collegians just escaped from the studious universities for a high week in town, have established themselves all together, and commenced a running commentary, carried on chiefly in the Virginia dialect, on men, women, and things, much to the annoyance of a very foreign gentleman behind them—so foreign that he is almost black—who looks stilettos at his cheerful but over-loquacious neighbours. One youth in an excessively white, though unpleasantly stiff cravat, is assisting an equally stiff old chaperon into her place, at the expense of great physical efforts, till his cheeks are thereby suffused with a tint strongly resembling the color of a juvenile beet, while the distended veins of his forehead would make a fine anatomical study for the laborious medical student, if that fabulous biped were still extant. The chaperon being disposed of, four young ladies under her surveillance, two in opera cloaks and hoods, and two in antediluvian mantles and pre-adamitic head-gear, assuring the existence of rural cousinship, by four minor efforts of the same gentleman, are at length safely landed in their places. But now commences a new round of confusion. Each of the four young ladies discovers that she has placed herself on some article of clothing belonging to her companion. Whereupon she half rises, and having drawn forth the disturbing habiliment, resumes her former position: and as this movement is performed by each one of them without regard to the order in which they have placed themselves, and is repeated half a dozen times in as many minutes, the unconscious fair ones become the subjects of the allusions of the fast-men, who immediately institute comparisons between them and various animate and inanimate objects. One of these gentlemen observing that their motions remind him of a flock of aquatic fowl, known by the name of divers, a facetious friend replies that probably he means diving bells; which being considered an extremely happy pun, it meets with a hearty laugh of approbation. But an ambitious fast wit, fearing that his reputation is likely to be lost forever, if he remain silent, says that the whole group of uneasy females recalls the line of Coleman,
"For what is so gay as a bag full of fleas."