STAGE-LAND.(舞台)

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STAGE-LAND.
1
STAGE-LAND.
By Jerome K. Jerome
STAGE-LAND.
2
THE HERO.
His name is George, generally speaking. "Call me George!" he says
to the heroine. She calls him George (in a very low voice, because she is
so young and timid). Then he is happy.
The stage hero never has any work to do. He is always hanging
about and getting into trouble. His chief aim in life is to be accused of
crimes he has never committed, and if he can muddle things up with a
corpse in some complicated way so as to get himself reasonably mistaken
for the murderer, he feels his day has not been wasted.
He has a wonderful gift of speech and a flow of language calculated to
strike terror to the bravest heart. It is a grand thing to hear him
bullyragging the villain.
The stage hero is always entitled to "estates," chiefly remarkable for
their high state of cultivation and for the eccentric ground plan of the
"manor house" upon them. The house is never more than one story high,
but it makes up in green stuff over the porch what it lacks in size and
convenience.
The chief drawback in connection with it, to our eyes, is that all the
inhabitants of the neighboring village appear to live in the front garden,
but the hero evidently thinks it rather nice of them, as it enables him to
make speeches to them from the front doorstep--his favorite recreation.
There is generally a public-house immediately opposite. This is
handy.
These "estates" are a great anxiety to the stage hero. He is not what
you would call a business man, as far as we can judge, and his attempts to
manage his own property invariably land him in ruin and distraction. His
"estates," however, always get taken away from him by the villain before
the first act is over, and this saves him all further trouble with regard to
them until the end of the play, when he gets saddled with them once more.
Not but what it must be confessed that there is much excuse for the
poor fellow's general bewilderment concerning his affairs and for his legal
errors and confusions generally. Stage "law" may not be quite the most
STAGE-LAND.
3
fearful and wonderful mystery in the whole universe, but it's near it--very
near it. We were under the impression at one time that we ourselves
knew something--just a little--about statutory and common law, but after
paying attention to the legal points of one or two plays we found that we
were mere children at it.
We thought we would not be beaten, and we determined to get to the
bottom of stage law and to understand it; but after some six months' effort
our brain (a singularly fine one) began to soften, and we abandoned the
study, believing it would come cheaper in the end to offer a suitable
reward, of about 50,000 pounds or 60,000 pounds, say, to any one who
would explain it to us.
The reward has remained unclaimed to the present day and is still
open.
One gentleman did come to our assistance a little while ago, but his
explanations only made the matter more confusing to our minds than it
was before. He was surprised at what he called our density, and said the
thing was all clear and simple to him. But we discovered afterward that
he was an escaped lunatic.
The only points of stage "law" on which we are at all clear are as
follows:
That if a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to
the nearest villain.
But if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to
whoever can get possession of that will.
That the accidental loss of the three-and-sixpenny copy of a marriage
certificate annuls the marriage.
That the evidence of one prejudiced witness of shady antecedents is
quite sufficient to convict the most stainless and irreproachable gentleman
of crimes for the committal of which he could have had no possible
motive.
But that this evidence may be rebutted years afterward, and the
conviction quashed without further trial by the unsupported statement of
the comic man.
That if A forges B's name to a check, then the law of the land is that B
STAGE-LAND.
4
shall be sentenced to ten years' penal servitude.
That ten minutes' notice is all that is required to foreclose a mortgage.
That all trials of criminal cases take place in the front parlor of the
victim's house, the villain acting as counsel, judge, and jury rolled into one,
and a couple of policemen being told off to follow his instructions.
These are a few of the more salient features of stage "law" so far as we
have been able to grasp it up to the present; but as fresh acts and clauses
and modifications appear to be introduced for each new play, we have
abandoned all hope of ever being able to really comprehend the subject.
To return to our hero, the state of the law, as above sketched, naturally
confuses him, and the villain, who is the only human being who does seem
to understand stage legal questions, is easily able to fleece and ruin him.
The simple-minded hero signs mortgages, bills of sale, deeds of gift, and
such like things, under the impression that he is playing some sort of a
round game; and then when he cannot pay the interest they take his wife
and children away from him and turn him adrift into the world.
Being thrown upon his own resources, he naturally starves.
He can make long speeches, he can tell you all his troubles, he can
stand in the lime-light and strike attitudes, he can knock the villain down,
and he can defy the police, but these requirements are not much in demand
in the labor market, and as they are all he can do or cares to do, he finds
earning his living a much more difficult affair than he fancied.
There is a deal too much hard work about it for him. He soon gives
up trying it at all, and prefers to eke out an uncertain existence by
sponging upon good-natured old Irish women and generous but weak-
minded young artisans who have left their native village to follow him and
enjoy the advantage of his company and conversation.
And so he drags out his life during the middle of the piece, raving at
fortune, raging at humanity, and whining about his miseries until the last
act.
Then he gets back those "estates" of his into his possession once again,
and can go back to the village and make more moral speeches and be
happy.
Moral speeches are undoubtedly his leading article, and of these, it
STAGE-LAND.
5
must be owned, he has an inexhaustible stock. He is as chock-full of
noble sentiments as a bladder is of wind. They are weak and watery
sentiments of the sixpenny tea-meeting order. We have a dim notion that
we have heard them before. The sound of them always conjures up to
our mind the vision of a dull long room, full of oppressive silence, broken
only by the scratching of steel pens and an occasional whispered "Give us
a suck, Bill. You know I always liked you;" or a louder "Please, sir,
speak to Jimmy Boggles. He's a-jogging my elbow."
The stage hero, however, evidently regards these meanderings as gems
of brilliant thought, fresh from the philosophic mine.
The gallery greets them with enthusiastic approval. They are a
warm-hearted people, galleryites, and they like to give a hearty welcome
to old friends.
And then, too, the sentiments are so good and a British gallery is so
moral. We doubt if there could be discovered on this earth any body of
human beings half so moral--so fond of goodness, even when it is slow
and stupid--so hateful of meanness in word or deed--as a modern theatrical
gallery.
The early Christian martyrs were sinful and worldly compared with an
Adelphi gallery.
The stage hero is a very powerful man. You wouldn't think it to look
at him, but you wait till the heroine cries "Help! Oh, George, save me!"
or the police attempt to run him in. Then two villains, three extra hired
ruffians and four detectives are about his fighting-weight.
If he knocks down less than three men with one blow, he fears that he
must be ill, and wonders "Why this strange weakness?"
The hero has his own way of making love. He always does it from
behind. The girl turns away from him when he begins (she being, as we
have said, shy and timid), and he takes hold of her hands and breathes his
attachment down her back.
The stage hero always wears patent-leather boots, and they are always
spotlessly clean. Sometimes he is rich and lives in a room with seven
doors to it, and at other times he is starving in a garret; but in either event
he still wears brand-new patent-leather boots.
STAGE-LAND.
6
He might raise at least three-and-sixpence on those boots, and when
the baby is crying for food, it occurs to us that it would be better if, instead
of praying to Heaven, he took off those boots and pawned them; but this
does not seem to occur to him.
He crosses the African desert in patent-leather boots, does the stage
hero. He takes a supply with him when he is wrecked on an uninhabited
island. He arrives from long and trying journeys; his clothes are ragged
and torn, but his boots are new and shiny. He puts on patent-leather
boots to tramp through the Australian bush, to fight in Egypt, to discover
the north pole.
Sometimes he is a gold-digger, sometimes a dock laborer, sometimes a
soldier, sometimes a sailor, but whatever he is he wears patent-leather
boots.
He goes boating in patent leather boots, he plays cricket in them; he
goes fishing and shooting in them. He will go to heaven in patent-leather
boots or he will decline the invitation.
The stage hero never talks in a simple, straightforward way, like a
mere ordinary mortal.
"You will write to me when you are away, dear, won't you?" says the
heroine.
A mere human being would reply:
"Why, of course I shall, ducky, every day."
But the stage hero is a superior creature. He says:
"Dost see yonder star, sweet?"
She looks up and owns that she does see yonder star; and then off he
starts and drivels on about that star for full five minutes, and says he will
cease to write to her when that pale star has fallen from its place amid the
firmament of heaven.
The result of a long course of acquaintanceship with stage heroes has
been, so far as we are concerned, to create a yearning for a new kind of
stage hero. What we would like for a change would be a man who
wouldn't cackle and brag quite so much, but who was capable of taking
care of himself for a day without getting into trouble.
STAGE-LAND.
7
THE VILLAIN.
He wears a clean collar and smokes a cigarette; that is how we know
he is a villain. In real life it is often difficult to tell a villain from an
honest man, and this gives rise to mistakes; but on the stage, as we have
said villains wear clean collars and smoke cigarettes, and thus all fear of
blunder is avoided.
It is well that the rule does not hold off the stage, or good men might
be misjudged. We ourselves, for instance, wear a clean collar--
sometimes.
It might be very awkward for our family, especially on Sundays.
He has no power of repartee, has the stage villain. All the good
people in the play say rude and insulting things to him, and smack at him,
and score off him all through the act, but he can never answer them back--
can never think of anything clever to say in return.
"Ha! ha! wait till Monday week," is the most brilliant retort that he can
make, and he has to get into a corner by himself to think of even that.
The stage villain's career is always very easy and prosperous up to
within a minute of the end of each act. Then he gets suddenly let in,
generally by the comic man. It always happens so. Yet the villain is
always intensely surprised each time. He never seems to learn anything
from experience.
A few years ago the villain used to be blessed with a hopeful and
philosophical temperament, which enabled him to bear up under these
constantly recurring disappointments and reverses. It was "no matter," he
would say. Crushed for the moment though he might be, his buoyant
heart never lost courage. He had a simple, child-like faith in Providence.
"A time will come," he would remark, and this idea consoled him.
Of late, however, this trusting hopefulness of his, as expressed in the
beautiful lines we have quoted, appears to have forsaken him. We are
sorry for this. We always regarded it as one of the finest traits in his
character.
The stage villain's love for the heroine is sublime in its steadfastness.
STAGE-LAND.
8
She is a woman of lugubrious and tearful disposition, added to which she
is usually incumbered with a couple of priggish and highly objectionable
children, and what possible attraction there is about her we ourselves can
never understand; but the stage villain--well, there, he is fairly mashed on
her.
Nothing can alter his affection. She hates him and insults him to an
extent that is really unladylike. Every time he tries to explain his
devotion to her, the hero comes in and knocks him down in the middle of
it, or the comic man catches him during one or the other of his harassing
love-scenes with her, and goes off and tells the "villagers" or the "guests,"
and they come round and nag him (we should think that the villain must
grow to positively dislike the comic man before the piece is over).
Notwithstanding all this he still hankers after her and swears she shall
be his. He is not a bad-looking fellow, and from what we know of the
market, we should say there are plenty of other girls who would jump at
him; yet for the sake of settling down with this dismal young female as his
wife, he is prepared to go through a laborious and exhaustive course of
crime and to be bullied and insulted by every one he meets. His love
sustains him under it all. He robs and forges, and cheats, and lies, and
murders, and arsons. If there were any other crimes he could commit to
win her affection, he would, for her sweet sake, commit them cheerfully.
But he doesn't know any others--at all events, he is not well up in any
others--and she still does not care for him, and what is he to do?
It is very unfortunate for both of them. It is evident to the merest
spectator that the lady's life would be much happier if the villain did not
love her quite so much; and as for him, his career might be calmer and less
criminal but for his deep devotion to her.
You see, it is having met her in early life that is the cause of all the
trouble. He first saw her when she was a child, and he loved her, "ay,
even then." Ah, and he would have worked--slaved for her, and have
made her rich and happy. He might perhaps even have been a good man.
She tries to soothe him. She says she loathed him with an
unspeakable horror from the first moment that her eyes met his revolting
form. She says she saw a hideous toad once in a nasty pond, and she says
STAGE-LAND.
9
that rather would she take that noisome reptile and clasp its slimy bosom
to her own than tolerate one instant's touch from his (the villain's) arms.
This sweet prattle of hers, however, only charms him all the more.
He says he will win her yet.
Nor does the villain seem much happier in his less serious love
episodes. After he has indulged in a little badinage of the above
character with his real lady-love, the heroine, he will occasionally try a
little light flirtation passage with her maid or lady friend.
The maid or friend does not waste time in simile or in metaphor. She
calls him a black-hearted scoundrel and clumps him over the head.
Of recent years it has been attempted to cheer the stage villain's
loveless life by making the village clergyman's daughter gone on him. But
it is generally about ten years ago when even she loved him, and her love
has turned to hate by the time the play opens; so that on the whole his lot
can hardly be said to have been much improved in this direction.
Not but what it must be confessed that her change of feeling is, under
the circumstances, only natural. He took her away from her happy,
peaceful home when she was very young and brought her up to this
wicked overgrown London. He did not marry her. There is no earthly
reason why he should not have married her. She must have been a fine
girl at that time (and she is a good-looking woman as it is, with dash and
go about her), and any other man would have settled down cozily with her
and have led a simple, blameless life.
But the stage villain is built cussed.
He ill-uses this female most shockingly--not for any cause or motive
whatever; indeed, his own practical interests should prompt him to treat
her well and keep friends with her--but from the natural cussedness to
which we have just alluded. When he speaks to her he seizes her by the
wrist and breathes what he's got to say into her ear, and it tickles and
revolts her.
The only thing in which he is good to her is in the matter of dress. He
does not stint her in dress.
The stage villain is superior to the villain of real life. The villain of
real life is actuated by mere sordid and selfish motives. The stage villain
STAGE-LAND.
10
does villainy, not for any personal advantage to himself, but merely from
the love of the thing as an art. Villainy is to him its own reward; he
revels in it.
"Better far be poor and villainous," he says to himself, "than possess
all the wealth of the Indies with a clear conscience. I will be a villain,"
he cries. "I will, at great expense and inconvenience to myself, murder
the good old man, get the hero accused of the crime, and make love to his
wife while he is in prison. It will be a risky and laborious business for
me from beginning to end, and can bring me no practical advantage
whatever. The girl will call me insulting names when I pay her a visit,
and will push me violently in the chest when I get near her; her golden-
haired infant will say I am a bad man and may even refuse to kiss me.
The comic man will cover me with humorous opprobrium, and the
villagers will get a day off and hang about the village pub and hoot me.
Everybody will see through my villainy, and I shall be nabbed in the end.
I always am. But it is no matter, I will be a villain--ha! ha!"
On the whole, the stage villain appears to us to be a rather badly used
individual. He never has any "estates" or property himself, and his only
chance of getting on in the world is to sneak the hero's. He has an
affectionate disposition, and never having any wife of his own he is
compelled to love other people's; but his affection is ever unrequited, and
everything comes wrong for him in the end.
Our advice to stage villains generally, after careful observation of
(stage) life and (stage) human nature, is as follows:
Never be a stage villain at all if you can help it. The life is too
harassing and the remuneration altogether disproportionate to the risks and
labor.
If you have run away with the clergyman's daughter and she still clings
to you, do not throw her down in the center of the stage and call her names.
It only irritates her, and she takes a dislike to you and goes and warns the
other girl.
Don't have too many accomplices; and if you have got them, don't
keep sneering at them and bullying them. A word from them can hang
you, and yet you do all you can to rile them. Treat them civilly and let
摘要：

STAGE-LAND.1STAGE-LAND.ByJeromeK.JeromeSTAGE-LAND.2THEHERO.HisnameisGeorge,generallyspeaking."CallmeGeorge!"hesaystotheheroine.ShecallshimGeorge(inaverylowvoice,becausesheissoyoungandtimid).Thenheishappy.Thestageheroneverhasanyworktodo.Heisalwayshangingaboutandgettingintotrouble.Hischiefaiminlifeist...

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