 | Scaramouch in Naxos |  |
PROLOGUE.
Silenus.Gentle readers—I would fain say, hearers, but I
am afraid I shall never fool it on the stage—I am very fond
of Pantomimes. I don't know whether I like this one so
well as I liked those which I witnessed when I was a boy.
It is too pretentious, I think; too anxious to be more than
a Pantomime—this play in which I am about to perform.
True Pantomime is a good-natured nightmare. Our sense
of humour is titillated and strummed, and kicked and oiled,
and fustigated and stroked, and exalted and bedevilled, and,
on the whole, severely handled by this self-same harmless
incubus; and our intellects are scoffed at. The audience,
in fact, is, intellectually, a pantaloon, on whom the Harlequin-pantomime
has no mercy. It is frivolity whipping its
schoolmaster, common-sense; the drama on its apex; art,
unsexed, and without a conscience; the reflection of the
world in a green, knotted glass. Now, I talked to the
author, and showed him that there was a certain absence
from his work of this kind of thing; but he put his thumbs
in his arm-pits, and replied with some disdain, “Which of
the various dramatic forms of the time may one conceive as
bearing on its branches things of earth and heaven
undreamt of in philosophy? The sensational dramas?
Perhaps from them some new development of tragic art;
but Pantomime seems to be of best hope. It contains in
crude forms, humour, poetry, and romance. It is the
childhood of a new poetical comedy.” Then I saw where
he was, and said, “God be with you,” and washed my hands
of him. But I'll do my best with my part.
| Scaramouch in Naxos | |