No wonder, Dolly, your battered waxen face is stamped with an angry sneer.The Hero, who eventually came into his estates amid the plaudits of the Pit, while you were left to die in the streets! you remembered, but the house had forgotten those earlier scenes in always wicked Paris.The good friend of the family, the breezy man of the world, the Deus ex Machina of the play, who was so good to everybody, whom everybody loved! aye, YOU loved him once--but that was in the Prologue.In the Play proper, he was respectable.(How you loathed that word, that meant to you all you vainly longed for!)To him the Prologue was a period past and dead; a memory, giving flavour to his life.To you, it was the First Act of the Play, shaping all the others.His sins the house had forgotten: at yours, they held up their hands in horror.No wonder the sneer lies on your waxen lips.
Never mind, Dolly; it was a stupid house.Next time, perhaps, you will play a better part; and then they will cheer, instead of hissing you.You were wasted, I am inclined to think, on modern comedy.You should have been cast for the heroine of some old-world tragedy.The strength of character, the courage, the power of self-forgetfulness, the enthusiasm were yours: it was the part that was lacking.You might have worn the mantle of a Judith, a Boadicea, or a Jeanne d'Arc, had such plays been popular in your time.Perhaps they, had they played in your day, might have had to be content with such a part as yours.They could not have played the meek heroine, and what else would there have been for them in modern drama? Catherine of Russia! had she been a waiter's daughter in the days of the Second Empire, should we have called her Great?
The Magdalene! had her lodging in those days been in some bye-street of Rome instead of in Jerusalem, should we mention her name in our churches?
You were necessary, you see, Dolly, to the piece.We cannot all play heroes and heroines.There must be wicked people in the play, or it would not interest.Think of it, Dolly, a play where all the women were virtuous, all the men honest! We might close the booth;the world would be as dull as an oyster-bed.Without you wicked folk there would be no good.How should we have known and honoured the heroine's worth, but by contrast with your worthlessness? Where would have been her fine speeches, but for you to listen to them?
Where lay the hero's strength, but in resisting temptation of you?
Had not you and the Wicked Baronet between you robbed him of his estates, falsely accused him of crime, he would have lived to the end of the play an idle, unheroic, incomplete existence.You brought him down to poverty; you made him earn his own bread--a most excellent thing for him; gave him the opportunity to play the man.
But for your conduct in the Prologue, of what value would have been that fine scene at the end of the Third Act, that stirred the house to tears and laughter? You and your accomplice, the Wicked Baronet, made the play possible.How would Pit and Gallery have known they were virtuous, but for the indignation that came to them, watching your misdeeds? Pity, sympathy, excitement, all that goes to the making of a play, you were necessary for.It was ungrateful of the house to hiss you.
And you, Mr.Merryman, the painted grin worn from your pale lips, you too were dissatisfied, if I remember rightly, with your part.
You wanted to make the people cry, not laugh.Was it a higher ambition? The poor tired people! so much happens in their life to make them weep, is it not good sport to make them merry for awhile?
Do you remember that old soul in the front row of the Pit? How she laughed when you sat down on the pie! I thought she would have to be carried out.I heard her talking to her companion as they passed the stage-door on their way home."I have not laughed, my dear, till to-night," she was saying, the good, gay tears still in her eyes, "since the day poor Sally died." Was not that alone worth the old stale tricks you so hated? Aye, they were commonplace and conventional, those antics of yours that made us laugh; are not the antics that make us weep commonplace and conventional also? Are not all the plays, played since the booth was opened, but of one pattern, the plot old-fashioned now, the scenes now commonplace?