PEEPING OUT OF A STAGE-BOX.

291

CHAPTER XXIV.

About Audiences.- A Sketch of a New York Audience.-Specimens from the Audience.-The Rights of Audiences.—The Right to Hiss.— Carrying Dissent very Far.-An Ungrateful Pit.-A Furious Canadian Audience.-Row in French Theatre.-Restoring Good Humor.—An Actor who was Hissed to Death.-The Right of Free Applause.—The Claqueur Nuisance.—Putting Down an Honest Hiss. - The Bouquet Nuisance. Curious Swindlers. · The Encore Nuisance. Coming Before the Curtain. - Bad Habits of Audiences. · Curious Anecdotes.-The Audience that Had to be Told to Go.-A California Specimen.-"Won't you Light that Gas-burner?"-An Unbiassed Witness.-Jenny Lind and the Hoosier.-Mrs. Partington at the Play.

--

To the general play-goer, it is presumed that the most interesting part of a theatre is Behind the Scenes.

To actors and actresses, naturally enough, the chief interest lies with the audience-Before the Footlights. At least, it has always been and is so with me.

I am never tired of studying that many-headed animal -the Audience. I love to take it up in its different elements, and ponder it-looking out from a cozy corner in a stage-box, myself unobserved.

The doors are thrown open, and now comes in the promiscuous crowd-that sea of human nothings which makes up a "good house" at the theatre. Kitty and her beau, who don't care a pin for the play, but have only come for a long conversation, in which they indulge during the entire evening, much to the annoyance of their immediate neighbors, who, strange to say, prefer listening to the comedy to overhearing Kitty's love confessions, and sometimes even intimate as much to young Larkins, who rudely heeds them not.

There is the school-girl of fifteen, who worships the

292

QUIZZING THE WOMEN.

walking gentleman, and refuses to believe that his moustache is painted.

There is the adolescent, who robs himself of sugarplums to buy flowers, which he throws at the feet of the danseuse.

There is the habitual theatre-goer, who remembers seeing this piece, or something very like it, at least thirty years ago, and according to whose statements theatricals, theatres and stage appointments of the present day are in a complete state of degeneracy.

There is the ex-artiste, of fifty well-told winters, who wonders why managers will let that chit of a girl play Juliet, when herself could play it a thousand times better. There is the man who laughs at everything. There is the universal fault-finder.

Ah, that is you, isit, Mrs. N.? You are coming in on a free ticket. Your sack is not of this year's make, dear; it looks old-fashioned. Never mind; you are honest. Your ideas of astronomy consist in the belief that the sun rises in the east of your husband's well-worn coat, and sets in his western boot-leg. You are naïve to insipidity, but you are as good as you are soft; so ma foi, I harm you not. Bless you-bless you!

Not so with you, Mrs. R. Your husband is a clerk in a commercial house, on a salary of fifteen hundred a year. How do you manage to pay $60 for your new but ugly little Empire bonnet? How do such trifles as cashmere shawls, diamond rings, and thread lace flounces find themselves in the wardrobe which your husband looks at admiringly, but ignorantly, too? He sometimes thinks that your various "aunts," who send you so many presents are very generous creatures, and often wonders why they never call at the house except when he is from home.

Why, Miss S., I hardly expected to see you here! Are your preparations for flight all made? Going to Europe,

eh, with that dear fellow who may be seen and is seen every day picking his white teeth in front of the St. Nicholas? Well, he is handsome, I admit. Owns an estate in the South, does he? Well, perhaps so. I never was very bright about boxing the compass, and a faro-bank in -street may be down South or up North for all I know. Only, why don't he ask you to marry him first? Among the late comers is Mr. J. piece much, but twists uneasily in suddenly and looks at the door. Your employers don't know it, yet.

He doesn't enjoy the his chair, and starts Compose yourself, J.

Four times the curtain comes down, and four times. there is gossip, and flirting, and scandal, and hypocrisy of all sorts.

Mrs. X comments on her neighbor, and calls her a "horrid creature." They kiss, nevertheless, each time they meet, and have a joint pew at Dr. Nobby's church.

Mr. ——, who, having neglected to call on Miss I, now crosses over to her, and says a few pleasant words; then bowing low, as he leaves her side, he congratulates himself that that bore is over. Miss I. smiles at him, and looks very archly through her long lashes, but she inwardly hates the ground he walks upon, as if the ground were personally to blame for receiving his weight. This she tells her mother, who, knowing that he is rich, is anxious for her daughter to entrap him.

But at last the curtain comes down for good, or bad perhaps, and Kitty gets her dress trod upon, and young Larkins loses his umbrella, and Pa leaves his overcoat on the seat, and a sweet-scented billet-doux passes from a small neatly gloved hand into one which is larger and not gloved, and P. lights a cigar, and Mrs. P. says the smoke makes her sick, and the swells take carriages, and the mediocrity take the omnibuses, and the plebeians walk, and the gas is turned off, and there is a damp smell in the the

294

BILIOUS AND STUPID AUDITORS.

atre, and in an hour or two, critics, and criticised, swells, mediocrities, plebeians and artistes are in that happy sleepy land where criticism comes not, and newspapers are

unknown.

A witty writer points out some of the peculiarities of theatre-attenders in this style: "There is the hypercritical man, a fool who amuses himself painfully. No convict condemned to shoemaking in a State prison suffers the pangs of disagreeable labor half as severely as a hypercritical individual when he attempts to enjoy himself in a theatre. Around him are people who have left dull care outside the entrance-wicket, who have bid melancholy a temporary farewell, and who have invoked all the gayety and joyousness of their natures for an hour of salubriousness. Relaxed features, unfurrowed brows, smiling faces, are about him, and there he sits beside, but not of, the general hilarity-morose, bilious, critical, watching, like an evil accusing spirit, for the occurrence of errors, of omission or commission. He retires from the theatre to look up the authorized version of the play, then sits down and writes an article on the decadence of the art of acting, which he sends to a theatrical paper, whose critic laughs at the strictures as absurdly severe, and dooms the essay to the oblivion of the waste-basket. There is the stupid theatre-attender, who is generally an individual who has 'nowhere to go' and no desire to go anywhere, who has little social feeling and less intellectuality, and who goes to the theatre merely to pass the time between supper and bed. To him, the theatre is not a temple of the drama, but merely a sort of waiting-room for bedtime, a room well lit up, bustling, noisy, spectacular, where one can do, in a quiet way, as one pleases-listen, look, or nod, and, above all, go out at regular intervals to 'liquor up.' When there happens to be a large number of these people in the house they act like a wet blanket on the spirits of

THE UNSOPHISTICATED AUDITOR.

295

the actors, for there is neither sign of approbation nor disapprobation, and the dullness that fills the house before the footlights seems magnetically to oppress the spirits of the people on the stage, and makes them look on a good hearty electrifying hiss as a change for the better. But the style of theatre-goer most delightful to the player is the unsophisticated young woman who believes it all. She knows not, and if she were told would not believe, that the youthful Juliet who makes her love, laugh, weep and hate, by turns, is the mother of grown-up children, and that the stern Capulet is a far more tender and a much younger man than the romantic Romeo, who has played the part for a quarter of a century. She is innocent, too, of all knowledge of machinery, and make-up, and all the very disagreeable resorts and devices of the stage. What would the knowing ones, who yawn and fume, and worry through a performance, not give if they could exchange their foolish wisdom for her blissful ignorance?—to think that the heroine has not studied every classic pose, winning expression, and thrilling accent: that the funny man is not sweating and toiling with heart-aching eagerness for the sake of a family nest built in a distant garret; that the hero is not suffering excruciating pangs of envy, and from unmerited neglect; that all the people beyond the footlights are enjoying themselves, and are merely acting, instead of working!"

In these days of battle for "equal rights," it seems to me that something ought to be said in behalf of the rights of audiences.

Among these, unquestionably, is the right to hiss. It is difficult to say just where the limits of this right are to be drawn; but that an audience has a right to express disapprobation is a thing which must be freely conceded.

I would urge all audiences to be generous in the exercise of this right, however. I would have them lenient