Chapter XI: Part 11

In genteel society, the half hour before dinner is generally accepted as a time of unlimited boredom and social frigidity, but there you have the relief, if not relaxation, of staring the guests out of countenance, making out a mental list of the people you would not like to take wine with, and turning over the leaves of the melancholy old albums, every page of which you have conned a hundred times before. But in the half hour (and it frequently is a whole one) before a public dinner, you have no albums or scrapbooks to dog’s-ear. There is no use in staring at your neighbours: the types of character are so similar—big and crimsoned sensuous faces looming over white waistcoats, with a plentiful sprinkling among them of the clerical element. You can’t smoke, you can’t (that is, I daren’t) order sherry and bitters. If you look out of the window, you see nothing but chimney pots, leads, and skylights, with a stray vagrant cat outrunning the constable over them; and the best thing you can do is to bring an amusing duodecimo with you, or betake yourself to one of the settles, and twiddle your thumbs till dinner-time. But, joy, joy, here are quails in the conversational famine; here is a welling spring in the wilderness. The door opens, and the sonorous voice of the head-waiter announces THE CHAIRMAN.

Very probably he is a lord. A philanthropic peer, always ready and willing to do a kind turn for anybody, and to the fore with his chairmanship, his set speeches, and his fifty-pound note for “fatuous monomaniacs,” “intellectual good-for-nothings,” or “decayed bailiffs.” He may be a regular dining-out lord, a not very rich nobleman, who has grown gray in taking the chair at charity dinners, and who is not expected to give anything to the institution save the powerful weight of his presence and influence. He may be a young lord, fresh caught, generously eager (as are, I am rejoiced to say, the majority of our young lords now-a-days) to vindicate the power and willingness for usefulness of his order; striving to show that there is not so much difference between his coronet and the Phrygian cap, save that one is made of velvet and the other of red worsted (ah! that irreconcileable red worsted), very impulsive, very imprudent, sometimes slightly imbecile, but full of good intentions and honest aspirations; or he may be a member of Parliament, a veteran of the back benches, burning to make up for his silence in the House by his eloquence in the forum of a tavern dinner. He may be a worthy banker or merchant, who gets through the speech-making before him in a business-like manner, and does not allow it in the least to interfere with the consumption of his proper quantum of wine; or he may be, as is very frequently the case, a lion—the “great gun”—the last blast of Fame’s trumpet for the hour: a lawyer, a traveller, a philosopher, or an author, whom the managing committee have secured, just as the manager of a theatre would secure a dwarf, a giant, a wild beast tamer, a blind piper, or a sword swallower, to enhance the receipts of the exhibition.

About thirty of the fifty people I don’t know from Adam gather immediately in a circle round the chairman. The few who have the honour to be on speaking terms with him jostle him sociably, and shake hands with him with a rueful expression of contentment. Those who don’t know him rub their hands violently, breathe hard, stare fixedly at him, and whisper to one another that he is very like his portrait, or that he isn’t at all like his portrait, or that he is getting old, or that he looks remarkably young, or some equally relevant banalities. The remaining twenty guests gather in the window-bays, and stare at nothing particular, or else read the printed prospectus of the Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs, and wonder how many of the fine list of stewards announced may be present on the occasion. As for the chairman, he takes up a position with his back safely glued (so it seems) to the mantelpiece, and preserves a dignified equanimity, working his head from side to side in his white neckcloth like that waxen effigy of Mr. Cobbett, late M.P. for Oldham, which terrifies country cousins by its vitality of appearance (those drab smallclothes and gaiters were a great stroke of genius) at Madame Tussaud’s.

By this time a crowd of more people you don’t know from Adam, and often outnumbering the fifty in the waiting-room, have gathered on the staircase, the landing, and have even invaded the precincts of the dining saloon, where they potter about the tables, peeping for the napkins which may contain the special cards bearing their name and denoting their place at the banquet. These are the people who _do_ know one another; these are the stewards, patrons of the charity, or gentlemen connected with its administration. They are all in a very excellent temper, as men need be who are about to partake of a capital dinner and a skinful of wine, and they crack those special jokes, and tell those special funny stories, which you hear nowhere save at a public dinner. Then, at the door, you see a detachment of waiters, bearing fasces of long, blue staves, tipped with brass, which they distribute to sundry inoffensive gentlemen, whose real attributes are at once discovered, and who are patent to the dining-out world as Stewards. They take the staves, looking very much ashamed of them; and, bearing besides a quaint resemblance to undertakers out for a holiday, and in a procession, which would be solemn if it wasn’t funny, precede the chairman to his place of honour.

The tables form three sides of an oblong quadrangle: sometimes the horse-shoe form is adopted. In the midst, in a line with the chairman, and as close to his august presence as is practicable, is a table of some ten or a dozen _couverts_, devoted to some modestly-attired gentlemen (some of them not in evening costume at all), whose particular places are all assigned to them; who for a wonder seem on most intimate terms mutually, and take wine frequently with one another; who are waited upon with the most sedulous attention, and have the very best on the table, both in the way of liquids and solids, at their disposal. They apply themselves to the consumption of these delicacies with great diligence and cheerfulness; but they do not seem _quite_ sufficiently impressed with the commanding merits of the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs. I wonder what special business brings these gentlemen hither. At some distance from this table, towards the door, but still in a line with the chairman, you see a pianoforte, and a couple of music-stands; partially concealed behind a crimson baize screen, beneath the gallery at the end, sit some stalwart individuals, of martial appearance, and superbly attired in scarlet and gold lace, whom you might easily, at first, mistake for staff officers, but whom their brass trombones and ophicleides speedily proclaim to be members of the band of one of the regiments of Guards. And high above all, supported on the sham scagliola Corinthian columns, with the gilt capitals, is a trellised balcony, full of ladies in full evening dress. What on earth those dear creatures want at such gatherings,—what pleasure they can derive from the spectacle of their husbands and friends over-eating and sometimes over-drinking themselves, or from the audition of stupid speeches, passes my comprehension. There they are, however, giggling, fluttering, waving tiny pocket-handkerchiefs, and striving to mitigate the meaty miasma of the place by nasal applications to their bouquets or their essence bottles; and there they will be, I presume, till public dinners go out of fashion altogether.[7]

I do not think I am called upon to give the bill of fare of a public dinner. I have no desire to edit the next republication of Ude, or Doctor Kitchener, Soyer, or Francatelli; besides, I could only make your and my mouth water by expatiating on the rich viands and wines which “mine host” (he is always mine host) of the Albion, the London Tavern, or the Freemasons’, provides for a guinea a-head. You remember what I told you the friend with the face like an over-ripe fig said of public dinners—that they were the sublimation of superfluities; and, indeed, if such a repast be not one of those in which a man is called upon to eat Italian trout, Dutch dory, Glo’ster salmon, quails and madeira, Cherbourg pea-chicks, Russian artichokes, Macedonian jellies, Charlottes of a thousand fruits, Richelieu puddings, vanilla creams, Toulouse leverets, iced punch, hock, champagne, claret, moselle and burgundy, port, sherry, kirschwasser, and pale brandy, I don’t know the meaning of the word superfluity at all.

Some three hours after the company have sate down to dinner; after the “usual loyal and constitutional toasts,” with the usual musical honours; after the toast of the evening—“Prosperity to the Royal Asylum for Fatuous Monomaniacs”—with its accompanying (more or less) eloquent speech from the noble or distinguished chairman, beseeching liberal pecuniary support for so deserving an institution; after the prompt and generous response, in the way of cheques and guineas, from the guests; after a tedious programme of glees and ballads has been got through, and the chairman has discreetly vanished to his carriage; after the inveterate diners-out, who _will_ tarry long at the wine, have received one or two gentle hints that coffee awaits their acceptance in an adjoining apartment; and about the time that the feast begins to wear a somewhat bleared and faded aspect (the lights cannot grow pale till they are turned off, for these are of the Gas Company’s providing), the waiters slouch about with wooden trays, full of ruined dessert-plates, cracked nuts, muddy decanters, and half-emptied glasses; cherry stalks, strawberry stems, squeezed oranges, the expressed skins of grapes, litter the tables; chairs are standing at all sorts of eccentric angles; and crumpled and twisted napkins are thrown pell-mell about. There is an end to the fine feast: the cates are eaten, the wine drunk. Lazarus the beggar might have taken his rags out of pawn (had he indeed any such rags to mortgage), and his thin-limbed little brats might have grown plump and rosy on a tithe of the money that has been wasted this night in guttling and guzzling. Wasted? Oh! say not wasted, Cynic; take the mote from thine own eye. Grumbler, for shame! I have done ill, I think, to caricature the name even of any public charity. Let the “Fatuous Monomaniacs” be numbered with the rest of my exploded fantastic conceits. Let this rather be remembered: that the tavern feast of superfluities is prolific in generous and glorious results; that from this seemingly gross and sensual gathering spring charity, love, mercy, and benevolence. Pardon the rich dinners and rare wines; look over the excess in animal enjoyments; forgive even the prosy speeches; for _the plate has gone round_. To-morrow Lazarus shall rejoice in his rags, and blind Tobias shall lift up his hands for gratitude; the voice in Rama shall be bushed and Rachel shall weep no more; and all because these good gentlemen with the rosy faces and the white waistcoats have dined so well. For these dinners are for the benefit of the sick and the infirm, the lunatic and the imbecile, the widow and the orphan, the decayed artist and the reduced gentlewoman, the lame, the halt, the blind, the poor harlot and the penitent thief, and they shall have their part in these abundant loaves and fishes; and the sublimation of superfluities must be condoned for the sake of those _voluntary contributions_ which are the noblest support of the noble charities in England. Remember the story of the Pot of Ointment. These superfluities yield a better surplus than though the spikenard was sold for an hundred-pence and given to the poor.

A very cream of waiters has taken good care of me during the evening. He now fetches me my walking gear, and as he pockets my modest “largesse,” whispers confidentially that he has had the honour of “seeing me afore;” and, blushing, I remember that I have met him at private parties. It is well for me if I can slip downstairs quietly, hail a cab, and drive to one of the operas; for an act of the “Trovatore” or “Lucrezia Borgia” are, in my opinion, far better than Seltzer water in restoring the balance of one’s mind after an arduous public dinner. But it oft-times happens that a man in your memorialist’s position has to pass a _quart d’heure de Rabelais_, worse than paying the bill, after one of these festive meetings. For, in a roomy apartment downstairs, lighted by waxen tapers, such things as pens, ink, and paper, coffee, cognac, and cigars, are, by the forethought of the liberal proprietors of the establishment, laid out for the benefit of those merry gentlemen you saw upstairs at the small table in a line with the chairman, where they were so well taken care of; and if circumstances compel me to be in a merry mood to-night, I must hie me into this roomy chamber, and scribble a column or so of “copy” about the dinner, which will appear to-morrow morning in the “Meteor.” Rubbing my eyes as I glance over the damp sheet between my own warm ones in bed, I wonder who ever could have written the report of all those elegant speeches. It seems at least a year since I dined with the “Fatuous Monomanaics.”

* * * * *

This is again six o’clock p.m., but not by any means on the same evening. The occasion could have no possible connection with going out to dinner, for it happens to be six o’clock “sharp:” and, moreover, it is on Friday, a day on which it is supposed to be as unlucky to go out to dinner as to go to sea, to marry, to put on a new coat, to commence a new novel, to cut your nails, or buy tripe. Now, what can I be doing in the city on this Friday evening? Certainly not to perform any of the operations alluded to above. Scarcely on business. Bank, Exchange, wharfs, Custom-house, money-market, merchants’ counting-houses, are all closed, and the inner city, the narrow winding lanes, that almost smell of money, are deserted. What am I doing so close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and why do I turn off by St. Martin’s-le-Grand? For the simple reason, that Friday evening is the very best one in the seven to witness the spectacle I am going to see—Newspaper Fair at the General Post Office.

In the vast vestibule, or hall, of the establishment so admirably presided over by Mr. Rowland Hill (for I do not reckon the aristocratic placeman who is, turn and turn about, Whig or Tory, its nominal chief, for much), and whose fostering care has made it (with some slight occasional shortcomings) the best-managed and most efficient national institution in Europe, you may observe, in the left-hand corner from the peristyle, and opposite the secretary’s office (tremendous “counts” are the clerks in the secretary’s office, jaunty bureaucrats, who ride upon park hacks, and are “come for” by ringlets in broughams at closing time, but who get through their work in about half the time it would take the ordinary slaves of the desk, simply because their shrewdness and knowledge of the world enables them to “see through a case” before the average man of tape and quill can make up his mind to docket a letter) a huge longitudinal slit in the panelling above, on which is the inscription “For newspapers only.” And all day long, newspapers only, stringed or labelled, are thrust into this incision; and the typographed lucubrations of the some five hundred men who, for salaries ranging from twenty shillings to twenty pounds per week, have to think, and sometimes almost feel, in the Anglo-Saxon tongue, for some sixty millions of people (I say nothing of the re-actionary influence upon foreign nations), go forth to the uttermost ends of the earth. But as six o’clock approaches (and six o’clock sharp is the irrevocable closing time for the departure of newspapers by the current night’s mail), they open a tall window above, and the newspapers are no more thrust, but flung in.

It is on this congenial ground that I meet those juvenile friends to whom I introduced a large circle of acquaintances, even in the second hour of “Twice Round the Clock”—I mean the newspaper boys. In another page I said, jestingly, that I was afraid of boys. I must except from the category the newspaper boys. I have been sadly harassed and teazed by them in their out-of-door or bagful state, when they go round to purchase newspapers: for I once happened to be editor of a cheap journal, at whose office there was no editor’s room. I was compelled, occasionally, to read my proofs behind the counter, in the presence of the publisher and his assistant, and I have endured much mental pain and suffering from the somewhat too demonstrative _facetiæ_ of the young gentlemen engaged in the “trade.” Verbal satire of the most acutely personal nature was their ordinary mode of procedure; but, occasionally, when the publication (as sometimes happened) was late in its appearance, their playfulness was aggravated to the extent of casting an old shoe at me, and on one signal occasion a bag of flour. Still the newspaper boy is the twin-brother of the printer’s devil; and, much as I have seen of those patient, willing little urchins, I should be a brute if I were hard to them, here.

The newspaper boys are, of course, in immense array at the six o’clock fair on Friday evening. They are varied, as currants are by sultanas in a dumpling, by newspaper men, who, where the boys struggle up to the window and drop in their load, boldly fling bags full, sacks full, of journals into the yawning casement. There is a legend that they once threw a boy into the window, newspapers and all. But at six o’clock everything is over—the window is closed—and newspaper fair is adjourned to the next Friday.

SEVEN O’CLOCK P.M.—A THEATRICAL GREEN-ROOM, AND “BEHIND THE SCENES.”

Dear friends and readers, we are approaching the sere and yellow leaf of our peregrinations “round the clock.” As the year wanes, as golden August points to the culminating glories of the year, but with oft-times a dark and impetuous storm presaging the evil days of winter that are to come, so I feel, hour after hour, that our (to me) pleasant intercommunications are destined to cease. You have been very forbearing with me, have suppressed a justifiable petulance at my short-comings, my digressions, my wayward fancies and prejudices, because you know (I hope and trust) that I am always your faithful servant and willing scribe, that (errors excepted, as the lawyers say) I have but one aim and end in these papers—to tell you the truth about London, its life and manners; to describe what I have seen, to tell you what I know; and to place before you, very timidly and under all correction, certain things which, in my opinion, it behoves you, and all who have a faith in the better part of humanity, to think about. Indeed, it is a very great privilege for a writer to be placed face to face with a hundred thousand critics every week, in lieu of half a hundred every half-year or so. He is flouted, and jeered, and scouted, and scolded, and remonstrated with, every time the penny post comes in; but he makes friends every week. He knows that his words are winged; he knows that he appeals to men who will understand his views, and to women who will sympathise with him; and though he may be as a pedlar, carrying about petty wares—ribbons, and tags, and small jewellery, and soap, and sweetstuff—he is vain enough to imagine that he can carry cheerfulness and content into many households; and that in speaking our common language of hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, he does not belie his cognomen of a “Welcome Guest.” If he—if I—thought otherwise, I would tear this sheet, sell my reversion, buy an annuity of £20 a year, and join the convent of La Trappe, to wear a cowl, sing matins and complins, eat black radishes, and dig my own grave, to-morrow.

Seven o’clock post meridian has brought us at least the artificial abnegation of daylight, and has subjected us to the _régime_ of gaslight. You had a twinkle of that unwholesome vapour, under the head of public dinners; but henceforth Sol will shine no longer on our labours. It is seven o’clock in the evening, and we are going to the play.

When I state that the subjects of this article are a Theatrical Green-Room, and “Behind the Scenes,” I anticipate some amount of intellectual commotion among the younger, and especially the “fast” portion, of my readers. Jaunty young clerks, and incipient men about town, dwelling in decorous country boroughs, will be apt to fancy that I am about to launch into a deliriously exciting account of those charmed regions which lie beyond the stage-door; that my talk will be altogether of spangles, muslin, skirts, and pink tights. Nay, even my young lady readers may deceive themselves with the idea that I shall draw a glowing picture of the dangerous, delightful creatures who flutter every night before theatrical audiences, and of the dear, naughty, wicked, darling marquises, earls, and baronets who lounge behind the scenes. _Helas! il n’en est rien._ I know all about green-rooms, wings, and prompt-boxes. I have been in the artistes’ _foyer_ of the Grand Opera, in the flies of her Majesty’s, and in the mezzanine floor of the Princess’s. I am not about to be cynical, but I must be prosaic, and mean to tell you, in a matter-of-fact way, what the green-room and behind the scenes of a London theatre are like at seven o’clock.

It is strange, though, what a fascination these forbidden regions exercise over the uninitiated. I never knew any one yet who was actuated by an inordinate desire to visit the vestry-room of a church, or to see the cupboard where the rector and curate’s surplices are suspended on pegs, or where the sacramental wine is kept. It is but seldom that I have seen anybody who evinced a particular curiosity to see a pawnbroker’s ware-room, at the top of the spout, or to become acquainted with the arcana of a butcher’s slaughter-house (though I must confess, myself, to having once, as a schoolboy, subscribed fourpence, in company with about ten others, to see a bullock killed)—yet everybody wants to go “behind the scenes.” Some twenty months since, I had business to settle with a firm of solicitors, haughty, precise, distant, and sternly business-like, who dwelt in Bedford Row. I think that some one who was a client of the firm had a judgment against me, to which was witness one Frederick Pollock, at Westminster; but let that pass. I settled the matter, and thought myself well out of the firm and its clutches, when the penultimate junior partner, a middle-aged, respectable man, with a prematurely-bald head, asked me to dinner at Verrey’s. He was good enough to allow me to order the repast, and politely deferred to my preference for _Macon vieux_ over hot sherry; but, towards the cheese, he hinted that a man of the world, such as I seemed to be, ought never to be in difficulties (I have been hopelessly insolvent since the year ’27, in which I was born), and that he would esteem it a very great favour if I would take him “behind the scenes” some night. Yes; this man of tape and quill, of green ferret and pounce, of sheepskins and abominable processes, positively wanted to see the Eleusinian mysteries of the interior of a London theatre. I showed them to him, and he is grateful still. I meet him occasionally at places of public resort. He is next to senior partner now, but he never hints at six-and-eightpence when I ask a legal question; and his most valuable act of friendship is this, that whenever the Sheriff of Middlesex is moved to run up and down in his bailiwick, with a special reference to my disparagement, I receive a mysterious message, generally conveyed by a battered individual, who wipes his face on the sleeve of his coat, and is not averse to taking “something short,” that there is “something out” against me, and that I had better look sharp. Whereupon I look out as sharp as I can for the most convenient tenth milestone out of Babylon.

Now, friend and fellow-traveller of mine, do you mind transforming yourself for the nonce into the friendly solicitor, and coming with me “behind the scenes?” I know that with these continual metamorphoses I am making a very golden ass of Apuleius of you; but it is all, believe me, for your benefit. I don’t want you to stand a dinner at Verrey’s. I only want you to put on the slippers of patience and the spectacles of observation, and to follow me.

There is, the moralist hath said, a time for all things, and that much libelled institution, a theatre, has among its Bohemian faults of recklessness and improvidence, the somewhat rare virtue of punctuality. Even those events of its daily life which depend for the extent of their duration upon adventitious circumstances, are marked by a remarkably well-kept average. Theatrical rehearsals generally commence at ten o’clock in the morning; and though it will sometimes happen, in the case of new pieces about to be produced—especially pantomimes and _spectacles_, that the rehearsal is prolonged to within a few minutes of the rising of the curtain for the evening performance, the usual turning of an ordinary rehearsal’s, or series of rehearsals’ lane, is four o’clock p.m. Then the _répétitêur_ in the orchestra shuts up his fiddle in its case, and goes home to his tea. Then the young ladies of the _corps de ballet_, who have been indulging in saltatory movements for the last few hours, lay aside their “practising dresses”—generally frocks of ordinary material, cut short in the manner immortalised by that notable pedlar, Mr. Stout, in his felonious transaction with the little old woman who fell asleep by the king’s highway—and subside into the long-flounced garments of common life, which are to be again replaced so soon as seven o’clock comes, by the abridged muslin skirts and flesh-coloured continuations of ballet-girlhood. The principal actresses and actors betake themselves to dinner, or to a walk in the park, or give themselves a finishing touch of study in the parts they are not yet quite perfect in, or, it may be, mount the steep theatrical stairs to the mountainous regions where dwell the theatrical tailor and tailoress—I entreat them to excuse me, the _costumier_ and the mistress of the robes—with whom they confer on the weighty subject of the dresses which they are to wear that evening. The carpenters abandon work; the scene-shifters, whose generic name in technical theatrical parlance is “labourers,” moon about the back part of the stage, seeing that the stock of scenery for the evening is all provided, the grooves duly blackleaded and the traps greased, and all the “sinks” and “flies,” ropes and pulleys, and other theatrical gear and tackle, in due working order. For, you see, if these little matters be not rigidly and minutely attended to, if a rope be out of its place or a screw not rightly home, such trifling accidents as mutilation and loss of life are not unlikely to happen. That the occurrence of such casualties is of so extreme a rarity may be ascribed, I think, to the microscopic care and attention which these maligned theatrical people bestow on every inch of their domain behind the scenes. They have to work in semi-darkness, and under many other circumstances of equal disadvantage; but, next to a fire-engine station and the ’tween decks of a man-o’-war, I do not think that I can call to mind a more orderly, better-disciplined, better-tended place than that part of a theatre which lies behind the foot-lights.

Now, mouse-like, from undiscovered holes, patter softly mysterious females in tumbled mob-caps and battered bonnets, who, by the way, have been pottering stealthily with brooms and brushes about the pit and boxes in the morning, disappearing towards noon. They proceed to disencumber the front of the house of the winding-sheets of brown holland in which it has been swathed since last midnight. These are the “cleaners,” and when they have made the house-clean and tidy for the audience of the evening, dusted the fauteuils, and swept the lobbies, they hie them behind the scenes, see that the proper provision of soap and towels exists in the dressing-rooms, perhaps lend a hand to the scene-shifters, who are completing _their_ afternoon’s labour by scientifically irrigating the stage with watering-pots; or, if a tragedy is to be performed, spreading the green baize extending to the foot-lights—that incomprehensible green baize—that field _vert_ on which Paris dies combatant, and Hamlet lies rampant, and without whose presence it is considered by many dramatic sages no tragedy could possibly be enacted.[8] Meanwhile, the property-man has brought to the verge of the wings, or laid out in trays and hampers, ready to be conveyed below by his assistants, the necessary paraphernalia and appurtenances for the pieces in that night’s bill. Shylock’s knife and scales, Ophelia’s coffin, Claude Melnott’s easel and maulstick, Long Tom Coffin’s mob-cap; the sham money, sham words, sham eatables and drinkables of this unreal and fantastic world, are all prepared. Presently the myrmidons of the wardrobe will take the required costumes from their frowning presses, and convey them to the dressing-rooms, ready for the histrionics who are to wear them. High up above all, above ceiling, and flies, and chandelier, in his lofty skylighted studio, the scene-painter throws down his “double-tie” brush, bids his colour-grinder clean his boots, indulges in a mighty wash, and dresses himself for the outward world. He improves marvellously by the change. But ten minutes since he was an almost indescribable scarecrow, in a tattered suit of canvas and list slippers, and bespattered from head to foot with dabs of colour. And now he turns out a trim gentleman, with a watch-chain, a moustache, an eye-glass, and kid gloves, and he walks off as gingerly to the artistic or literary club to which he may belong, as though he had never heard of size or whitewash in his life.

By five o’clock the little industries that have prevailed since the rehearsal ended are mostly completed; and the theatre becomes quite still. It is a complete, a solemn, almost an awful stillness. All the busy life and cheerful murmur of this human ant-hill are hushed. The rows of seats are as deserted as the degrees of some old ruined amphitheatre in Rome. The stage is a desert. The “flies” and “borders” loom overhead in cobweb indistinctness. Afar off the dusky, feeble chandelier, looks like a moon on which no sun condescends to shine; and were it not for one ray of golden afternoon sunlight, that from a topmost window shines obliquely through the vast dimness, and rescues the kettle-drums in the orchestra from tenebrose oblivion, you might fancy this place, which two hours hence will be brilliantly lighted up, full of gorgeous decorations and blithesome music, and a gay audience shouting applause to mimes and jesters and painted bayadères, chasing the golden hours with frolic feet—you might fancy the deserted theatre to be a Valley of Dry Bones.

Only two functionaries are ever watchful, and do not entertain the slightest thought, either of suspending their vigilance, or of leaving the theatre. At the entrance, in his crabbed little watch-box by the stage-door, the grim man in the fur cap, who acts as Cerberus to the establishment, sits among keys and letters for delivery. Of a multifarious nature is the correspondence at a stage-door. There are County Court summonses, seductive offers from rival managers to the popular tragedian of the day, pressing entreaties for orders, pink three-cornered notes scented and sealed with crests for the _première danseuse_, frequently accompanied by pinned-up _cornets_ of tissue-paper containing choice bouquets from Covent Garden. There are five-act tragedies, and farces, written on official paper for the manager; solicitations for engagements, cards, bills, and applications for benefit tickets. But the grim man at the stage-door takes no heed of them, save to deliver them to their proper addresses. He takes no heed either (apparently) of the crowds of people, male and female, who pass and repass him by night and by day, from Monday till Saturday. But he knows them all well, be assured; knows them as well as Charon, knows them as well as Cerberus, knows them as well as the turnkey of the “lock” in a debtor’s prison. Scene-shifter or popular tragedian, it is all one to him. He has but to obey his _consigne_ to let no one pass his keyed and lettered den who is not connected with the theatre, or who has not the _entrée_ behind the scenes by special managerial permission; and in adhering to that, he is as inflexible as Death. And while he guards the portal, Manager Doldrum sits in his easy-chair in his manuscript-littered private room upstairs. The rehearsal may be over, but still he has work to do. He has always work to do. Perhaps he anticipates a thin house to-night, and is busy scribbling orders which his messenger will take care shall permeate through channels which shall do the house no harm. Or he may be glancing over a new farce which one of the accredited authors of the theatre has just sent in, and with black-lead pencil suggesting excisions, additions, or alterations. Or perhaps he tears his hair and gnashes his teeth in dignified privacy, thinking with despair upon the blank receipts of the foregone week, murmuring to himself, “Shall I close! shall I close?” as a badgered and belated Minister of State might ask himself, “Shall I resign?”

I wonder how many people there are who see the manager airing his white waistcoat in his especial stage-box, or envy him as he drives away from the theatre in his brougham, or joyfully takes his cheque on Ransom’s for that last “stunning” and “screaming” new farce that forty pounds were given for, and that ran four nights; I wonder how many of these outsiders of the theatrical arcana know what a persecuted, hunted dog, a genteel galley-slave, a well-dressed Russian serf, is the theatrical manager. He may well be coarse and _brusque_ in his manners, captious and pettish in conversation, remiss in answering letters, averse to parting with ready money for manuscripts which are often never acted, and more often never read. Do you know the life he leads? Mr. Pope’s existence at Twickenham (or Twitnam), about the period when he instructed “good John,” his man, to say that he was sick, or dead, was a combination of halcyon days compared to the life of a theatrical manager. Are there sons “destined their fathers’ souls to cross,” who “pen a stanza when they should engross?” are there men with harum-scarum lunatic projects, with tomfool notions that they are tragedians, with tragedies and farces, to estimate whose real value one should make a handsome deduction for the injury done to the paper on which they are written? are there madcap young ladies, newly-whipped at boarding-school, who fancy that they have the vocal powers of Grisi or Bosio, or the tragic acquirements of Ellen Tree or Helen Faucit (excuse the Kean and Martin marital prefixes: the old names are _so_ pleasant)? are there mad mothers who vehemently insist that their skimping daughters can dance like Rosati or Pocchini? are there “guardians,” in other words the proprietary slaveholders of dwarfs and contorsionists, precocious pianists, and female violoncellists? are there schemers, knaves, Yankee speculators, foreign farmers of singers with cracked voices, bores or insipid idlers—they all besiege the theatrical manager, supplicate, cajole, annoy, or threaten him. If he doesn’t at once accede to their exorbitant terms, they forthwith abuse him scurrilously out of doors. He is a robber, an impostor, a miser, a Jew. He has been transported. He is insolvent. He came out ten years since in the provinces, and in light comedy, and failed. He beats his wife. He was the ruin of Miss Vanderplank, and sent men into the house to hiss and cry out “pickles” when Toobey the tragedian was performing his starring engagements, because, forsooth, Toobey did not draw. He owes ten thousand pounds to Miss Larke, the _soprano_. He buys his wardrobe in Petticoat Lane. He drinks fearfully. He will be hung. I have been an editor, and know the amenities that are showered on _those_ slaves of the lamp; the people who accuse you of having set the Thames on fire, and murdered Eliza Grimwood, if you won’t accept their interminable romances, and darkly insinuate that they will have your heart’s blood if you decline to pay for poems copied from the annuals of eighteen hundred and thirty-six; but to find the acme of persecution and badgering commend me to a theatrical manager.

Return we to our muttons. The theatre sleeps a sound, tranquil sleep for some hundred minutes; but about six it begins to wake again to fresh life and activity. At half-past six it is wide awake and staring. The “dressers,” male and female, have arrived, and are being objurgated by incensed performers in their several _cabinets de toilette_, because they are slow in finding Mr. Lamplugh’s bagwig, or Mademoiselle Follejambe’s white satin shoes. The call-boy—that diminutive, weazened specimen of humanity, who has never, so it seems, been a boy, and never will be a man—has entered upon his functions, and already meditates a savage onslaught on the dressing-room doors, accompanied by a shrill intimation that the overture is “on.” Let us leave the ladies and gentlemen engaged in the theatre to complete the bedizenment of their apparel, and, pending their entrance into the green-room, see what that apartment itself is made of.

Of course it is on a level with the stage, and within a convenient distance of that prompt-box which forms the head-quarters of the call-boy, and where he receives instructions from his adjutant-general, the prompter. In country theatres, the green-room door is often within a foot or so from the wing; and there is a facetious story told of a whilom great tragedian, who, now retired and enjoying lettered and dignified ease as a country gentleman, was, in his day, somewhat remarkable for violent ebullitions of temper. He was playing Hamlet; and in the closet scene with Gertrude, where he kills the old chamberlain, who lies in ambuscade, and just at the moment he draws his rapier, it occurred to his heated imagination that an inoffensive light comedian, ready dressed for the part of Osric, who was standing at the green-room door within reasonable sword range, was the veritable Polonius himself. Whereupon the tragedian, shrieking out, “A rat! a rat! dead, for a ducat—dead!” made a furious lunge at the unhappy Osric, who only escaped instant death by a timely hop, skip, and jump, and fled with appalling yells to a sofa, under which he buried himself. Tradition says that the tragedian’s rapier went right through the wood-work of the half-opened door; but I know that tradition is not always to be trusted, and I decline to endorse this particular one now.

Our present green-room is a sufficiently commodious apartment, spacious and lofty, and fitted up in a style of decoration in which the Louis Quinze contends with the Arabesque, and that again with the Cockney Corinthian. The walls are of a pale sea-green, of the famous Almack’s pattern; and the floor is covered with a carpet of remarkably curious design and texture, offering some noteworthy specimens of worsted vegetation run to seed, and rents and fissures of extraordinary polygonal form. In one corner there is a pianoforte—a grand pianoforte; at least it may have been at one time deserving of that high-sounding appellation; but it is now a deplorable old music-box, with a long tail that would be much better between its legs, and keys that are yellow and worn down, like the teeth of an old horse. There is a cheval glass, too, in tolerably good repair, for the _danseuses_ to arrange their skirts withal; and over the chimney-piece there is another great glass, with a tarnished frame and longitudinal crack extending over it, in the sides of which—the interstices of the frame, I mean, not the crack—are stuck notices having reference to the rehearsals to be held on the morrow. “All the ladies of the ballet at ten;” “All the company for reading of new piece at twelve.” So may run the wafered announcements signed in the fine Roman hand of the prompter or stage-manager. There are varied pilasters, in imitation of scagliola, supporting the ceiling; the doors are handsomely panelled with gilt headings. There are four tall windows in a row, with cornices wofully dingy, and draped with curtains of shabby moreen. There is good store of settees and ottomans covered with faded chintz. Everything about the place bears that “stagey,” unreal, garish, dream-like aspect, that seems inherent to things theatrical, and makes us, directly we pass the stage-door, look upon everything, from the delusive banquet on the imitation marble table, to the paint on the singing chambermaid’s cheeks, as a mockery and a delusion—as the baseless fabric of a vision, that will soon fade and leave not a wrack behind. And yet I have said (_vide ante et supra_) that “behind the scenes is common-place.” And so it is; but it is the common-place of dreamland, the every-day life of the realms of Prester John, the work-a-day existence of the kingdom of Cockaigne, or of that shadowy land where dwell the Anthropophagi, and men “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”

What shall I assume the first piece that is to be performed this night to be? Will you have the “Flowers of the Forest,” the “Poor Strollers,” “Sweethearts and Wives,” “Pizarro,” the “Padlock,” or a “Game at Romps?” What do you say to a fine old English comedy, such as “John Bull,” or the “School of Reform,” with a dissipated young squire, a gouty, ill-tempered, and over-bearing old lord of the manor, an intensely-virtuous tenant-farmer, a comic ploughman, a milkmaid with a chintz gown tucked through the placket-holes, and a song, and a spotless but a persecuted maiden? No; you will have none of these! Suppose, then, we take our dear old genial friend, the “Green Bushes”—long life and good luck to Mr. Buckstone, and may he write many more pieces as good for our imaginary theatre. See; the green-room clock points to ten minutes to seven—I left that out in my inventory of the furniture. The call-boy has already warned the ladies and gentlemen who are engaged for the first scene, that their immediate presence is required, and the erst-deserted green-room fills rapidly.

See, here they came—the kindly old friends of the “Green Bushes”—Miami and Jack Gong, and Master Grinnidge; and yet, dear me, what are these strange, wild costumes mingled with them? Oh! there is a burlesque after the drama. It is somewhat early in the evening for those who are to play in the second piece to come down dressed; but then you are to consider this as a special green-room, a specimen green-room, an amalgam of the green-room element generally. This model _foyer_ is to have something of the Haymarket and something of the Adelphi—the old by-gone, defunct Adelphi, I mean—a spice of the Olympic, a tinge of the Lyceum, and a dash of the Princess’s, about it. I except the green-room of Drury Lane, which never resembled anything half so much as a family vault, and the green-rooms of the two Operas, which, though splendidly furnished and appointed, are almost deserted during the performances, the great _tenori_ and _soprani_ preferring to retire to their dressing-rooms when any long intervals of rest occur.

“Things”—to use a bit of “Green Bushes” _facetiæ_, invented, I am willing to believe, by that incorrigible humourist, Mr. Wright, and which has grown proverbial—“things isn’t as they used to was;” and the attractions of green-rooms have deteriorated, even within my time. When I say “my time,” I mean a quarter of a century; for as I happened to be almost born in a prompt-box and weaned in a scene-painter’s size-kettle, and have been employed in very nearly every capacity in and about a theatre—save that of an actor, which profession invincible modesty and incurable incompetency prevented me from assuming—I feel myself qualified to speak about the green-rooms with some degree of authority. To have read a three-act melodrama to a (scarcely) admiring audience, and to have called “everybody for the last scene” in a green-room, gives a man, I take it, a right to be heard.

But, to tell the truth, green-rooms now-a-days are sadly dull, slow, humdrum places of resort. In a minor theatre they are somewhat more lively, as there is there no second green-room, and the young sylphides of the _corps de ballet_ are allowed to join the company. The conversation of these young ladies, if not interesting, is amusing, and if not brilliant, is cheerful. They generally bring their needle-work with them if they have to wait long between the scenes (frequently to the extent of an entire act) in which they have to dance, and they discourse with much _naïveté_ upon the warmth or coldness of the audience with reference to the applause bestowed, the bad temper of the stage-manager, and their own temporary indisposition from corns, which, with pickled salmon, unripe pears, the proper number of lengths for a silk dress, and the comparative merits of the whiskers and moustaches of the musicians in the band (with some of whose members they are sure to be in love, and whom they very frequently marry, leaving off dancing and having enormous families), form the almost invariable staple of a ballet-girl’s conversation. Poor simple-minded, good-natured, hard-working little creatures, theirs is but a rude and stern lot. To cut capers and wear paint, to find one’s own shoes and stockings, and be strictly virtuous, on a salary varying from nine to eighteen shillings a week—this is the pabulum of a ballet-girl. And hark in thine ear, my friend. If any man talks to you about the syrens of the ballet, the dangerous enchantresses and cockatrices of the ballet, the pets of the ballet, whose only thoughts are about broughams and diamond _aigrettes_, dinners at Richmond, and villas at St. John’s Wood—if anybody tells you that the majority, or even a large proportion, of our English _danseuses_ are inclined this perilous way, just inform him, with my compliments, that he is a dolt and a teller of untruths. I can’t say much of ballet morality abroad; of the poor _rats de l’opera_ in Paris, who are bred to wickedness from their very cradle upwards; of the Neapolitan _ballerine_, who are obliged to wear green _calzoni_, and to be civil to the priests, lest they should be put down altogether; or of the poor Russian ballet-girls, who live altogether in barracks, are conveyed to and from the theatre in omnibuses, and are birched if they do not behave themselves, and yet manage somehow to make a bad end of it; but as regards our own sylphides, I say that naughtiness among them is the exception, and cheerful, industrious, self-denying perseverance in a hard, ungrateful life, the honourable rule.

There are yet a few green-rooms where the genus “swell” still finds a rare admittance. See here a couple in full evening costume, talking to the pretty young lady in the low-necked dress on the settee; but the swell is quite a fish out of water in the green-room of these latter days. Managers don’t care quite so much for his patronage, preferring to place their chief reliance and dependence on the public. The actors don’t care about him, for the swell is not so generous as of yore in taking tickets for the benefits of popular favourites. Actresses mistrust him, for the swell has given up raising actresses to the peerage. The ballet-girls are half afraid of him; and when they don’t fear him, they laugh at him. So the swell wanders in and out of the green-room, and stares at people uneasily, and at last escapes to his brougham or his cabriolet at the stage-door. Now and then a wicked old lord of the unrighteous evil-living school of British peers, now happily becoming rarer and rarer every day, will come sniggering and chuckling into a green-room, hanging on the arm of the manager, with whom he is on the most intimate terms, and who “My Lords” him most obsequiously. He rolls his scandalous old eyes in his disreputable, puckered face, seeking some pretty, timid, blushing little flower, whom he may blight with his Upas gaze, and then totters away to his stage-box, where he does duty for the rest of the evening with a huge double-barrelled opera-glass.

Such is the green-room of to-day, quiet, occasionally chatty (for actresses and actors can be pleasant enough among themselves, in a cosy, sensible manner, talking about butcher’s meat, and poor’s-rates, and Brompton omnibuses); but not by any means the glittering Temple of Radiant Delight that some might feel inclined to imagine it. There have been days—and I remember them—when green-rooms were very different places. There were women on the stage then who were Queens as well as actresses, and had trains of admirers round their flowing robes. There was a slight nervous man in those days—a famous writer of plays and books that yet live, and will live while our English language is spoken—a strange-looking, high-cheek-boned man, with long hair carelessly thrown away from his forehead, and a piercing eye, that seemed to laugh to scorn the _lorgnon_ dangling from its ribbon. I have seen him so, his spare form leaning against the mantel, and he showering—yes, showering is the word—arrowy _bon mots_ and corruscating repartees around him. He is dead: they all seem to be dead, those brilliant green-room men—Jerrold, Talfourd, Kenney, Haynes Bayley, Hook, A’Beckett. They have left no successors. The modern play-wrights skulk in and out of the manager’s room, and are mistaken at rehearsal for the property-men. They forsake green-rooms at night for drawing-rooms, where they can hear themselves praised, or smoking-rooms of clubs, where they can abuse one another; and if A. says a good thing, B. books it for his next _petite comédie_, which does not hurt A. much, seeing that he stole it from C., who translated it hot-and-hot from Monsieur de D., that great plagiarist from Lope de Vega.

Come, let us leave the green-room to its simple devices, and see what they are doing “Behind the Scenes.” You and I, we know, are in the receipt of fern-seed, and can walk invisible without incommoding ourself or anybody else, be the pressure ever so great; but I should strongly advise all swells and other intruders, if any such remain, either to withdraw into the shadiest recesses of the green-room, or to “get out of that”—to use an Irishism, without the least possible delay. For “Behind the Scenes” is clearly no place for them. If I were the manager of a theatre, I would not admit one single person into the _coulisses_ save those connected with the night’s performance, nay, nor allow even the _employés_ of the theatre, till the call-boy summoned them to approach the wing. Madame Vestris established this Spartan rule of discipline, and found it answer in making her theatre the best-managed in Europe; but it will be observed that no such _ordre du jour_ has been promulgated in the theatre behind whose scenes we find ourselves to-night. What a confusion, what a hubbub, what a throng and bustle! The _dramatis personæ_, you will perceive, no longer contemplate the performance of the “Green Bushes.” Hoops, powder, brocade, black-patches, high-heeled shoes, bag-wigs, flapped waistcoats, and laced-hats prevail. This must be some Pompadour or Beau Tibbs piece—“Court Favour,” or “Love’s Telegraph,” or some last century dramatic conceit by Mr. Planché or Mr. Dance. How the carpenters scuffle and stamp, entreating the bystanders, not always in the politest terms, to get out of the way! Now and again the prompter rushes from his box, and in a hoarse _sotto voce_, that would be a shriek if it were not a whisper, commands silence.