MANDEVILLE.I can imagine how enjoyable the stage might be, cleared of all its traditionary nonsense, stilted language, stilted behavior, all the rubbish of false sentiment, false dress, and the manners of times that were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture that are current to-day.I've seen private theatricals, where all the performers were persons of cultivation, that....
OUR NEXT DOOR.So have I.For something particularly cheerful, commend me to amateur theatricals.I have passed some melancholy hours at them.
MANDEVILLE.That's because the performers acted the worn stage plays, and attempted to do them in the manner they had seen on the stage.It is not always so.
THE FIRE-TENDER.I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got into a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed to be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse from within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of turning out a piece of literary work.That's the reason we have so much poetry that impresses one like sets of faultless cabinet-furniture made by machinery.
THE PARSON.But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting or in anything.I tell you nature is poor stuff.It can't go alone.
Amateur acting--they get it up at church sociables nowadays--is apt to be as near nature as a school-boy's declamation.Acting is the Devil's art.
THE MISTRESS.Do you object to such innocent amusement?
MANDEVILLE.What the Parson objects to is, that he isn't amused.
THE PARSON.What's the use of objecting? It's the fashion of the day to amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.
HERBERT.The Parson has got us off the track.My notion about the stage is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the world; the stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience.
Assumed dress on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes people no more constrained and self-conscious than it does off the stage.
THE MISTRESS.What sarcasm is coming now?
HERBERT.Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good clothes yet.The majority do not wear them with ease.People who only put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an artificial feeling.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so difficult to get hold of his congregation.
HERBERT.I don't know how else to account for the formality and vapidity of a set "party," where all the guests are clothed in a manner to which they are unaccustomed, dressed into a condition of vivid self-consciousness.The same people, who know each other perfectly well, will enjoy themselves together without restraint in their ordinary apparel.But nothing can be more artificial than the behavior of people together who rarely "dress up." It seems impossible to make the conversation as fine as the clothes, and so it dies in a kind of inane helplessness.Especially is this true in the country, where people have not obtained the mastery of their clothes that those who live in the city have.It is really absurd, at this stage of our civilization, that we should be so affected by such an insignificant accident as dress.Perhaps Mandeville can tell us whether this clothes panic prevails in the older societies.
THE PARSON.Don't.We've heard it; about its being one of the Englishman's thirty-nine articles that he never shall sit down to dinner without a dress-coat, and all that.
THE MISTRESS.I wish, for my part, that everybody who has time to eat a dinner would dress for that, the principal event of the day, and do respectful and leisurely justice to it.
THE YOUNG LADY.It has always seemed singular to me that men who work so hard to build elegant houses, and have good dinners, should take so little leisure to enjoy either.
MANDEVILLE.If the Parson will permit me, I should say that the chief clothes question abroad just now is, how to get any; and it is the same with the dinners.
II
It is quite unnecessary to say that the talk about clothes ran into the question of dress-reform, and ran out, of course.You cannot converse on anything nowadays that you do not run into some reform.
The Parson says that everybody is intent on reforming everything but himself.We are all trying to associate ourselves to make everybody else behave as we do.Said--OUR NEXT DOOR.Dress reform! As if people couldn't change their clothes without concert of action.Resolved, that nobody should put on a clean collar oftener than his neighbor does.I'm sick of every sort of reform.I should like to retrograde awhile.Let a dyspeptic ascertain that he can eat porridge three times a day and live, and straightway he insists that everybody ought to eat porridge and nothing else.I mean to get up a society every member of which shall be pledged to do just as he pleases.
THE PARSON.That would be the most radical reform of the day.That would be independence.If people dressed according to their means, acted according to their convictions, and avowed their opinions, it would revolutionize society.
OUR NEXT DOOR.I should like to walk into your church some Sunday and see the changes under such conditions.
THE PARSON.It might give you a novel sensation to walk in at any time.And I'm not sure but the church would suit your retrograde ideas.It's so Gothic that a Christian of the Middle Ages, if he were alive, couldn't see or hear in it.
HERBERT.I don't know whether these reformers who carry the world on their shoulders in such serious fashion, especially the little fussy fellows, who are themselves the standard of the regeneration they seek, are more ludicrous than pathetic.