Wherein the author considers comedies of manners, and players who succeed illy in living up to them.
"The theater has its own aristocracy", declares the author of a book about families that, generation after generation, have given actors to that institution in America. It is not of "its own aristocracy" that I intend writing, but of the aristocracy it mimics. When I speak of "The Smart Set on the Stage", the reference is to those men and women who trail their cigarette smoke and their gowns through the modern society play.
There are fashions in drama, just as there are in dresses, and managerial modistes begin to sense a return to favor of the tea cup comedy. Fifteen years ago, during an era of romance, the tinsmith superceded the tailor. A decade later, "guns" were more worn than girdles, and the prevailing mode in millinery was the Mexican sombrero, with a leather belt in place of a band. The hero of a play was the male who could shoot straightest. Now, once again, the hero is the gentleman who can successfully balance, at one and the same time, a punch glass, a plate of biscuits, and the arguments for and against running away with his friend's wife. Within the past few months we have had such examples of their school as "Electricity", "Smith", "The Gamblers", "Nobody's Widow", "Getting a Polish" and "We Can't Be as Bad as All That", the last by that inveterate dramatizer of the social whirl, Henry Arthur Jones. With Jones in his heaven, all's right with the whirl'd!
Nor do these six compose a complete list. Mary Garden is still "wallowing", and surely Salome belonged to one of the best families of the East! Lady Macbeth and her husband--not the Macbeths who make lamp chimneys; O, dear no!--must have been in the blue book of their day. We met some very nice people with Mary Magdalene, too, and Prince Bellidor, in "Sister Beatrice", behaved like one of the idle rich, but inasmuch as their conduct in society, ancient or modern, was not the theme of the works in which they appeared I shall omit further mention of these works.
The rich we have always with us. That is why Thackeray is more popular than Dickens, and that is why the smart set has been paraded theatrically since Thespis took the first wagon show on a tour of Greece. We are a lot of Pomonas--particularly the women among us--and we cannot help revelling in the doings of dignitaries whose place in life, but for fear of making this article sound railroad-y, I should describe as an elevated station. The more humble we are the greater the craving and the delight. Lizzie Brown, who measures ribbon behind a counter from breakfast 'til dinner, naturally extracts infinite pleasure from spending her evenings with only a row of footlights between herself and wonderful beings who toil not and spin nothing but yarns. That is almost like moving in the best circles oneself; it is being transported to a world millions of miles from the brass tracks in the ribbon counter. Miss Brown half believes herself a great lady by morning, as you may judge by her manner if you go to her for a yard of baby blue. Everyone of us has something of Lizzie Brown in his or her make-up. The same instinct that moves us to marry our daughter to the Prince of This or the Duke of That causes us to remember "East Lynne" when we have forgotten "Hazel Kirke."