A GOOD OLD COMIC CLOWN WANTED.
“Mr. Punch, Sir,
“I want to say a word or two upon what seems to me a matter of great national importance, and as the nation reads your paper more than any other, it is naturally to you that I am tempted to address myself. Sir, the subject I allude to, is the marked decline of Pantomime, and the gradual extinction of the good old Comic Clown, and if this be not a matter of importance to the nation, I shall be obliged to it to tell me one that is.
“In my young days a pantomime, Sir, strictly was a pantomime: a tale, that is, ‘exhibited in gesture and in dumb show;’ it is thus great Doctor Johnson in his wisdom has defined it, and there then was no departure from the meaning of the word. The tale which was presented was always one of Love, and showing how the course of it never doth run smooth. A good and evil fairy used their influence through the Opening, and at the end of it the good one transformed the faithful lovers into harlequin and columbine, and sent them dancing happily towards the Bowers of Bliss: while to worry them by the way, clown and pantaloon were summoned by the crutch of the bad fairy, and respectively emerged from the clothes of the Cruel Father, and of the Rich and Ugly Suitor who had had his ears boxed. To save him from these persecutors, the good fairy then gave harlequin his magic cap and wand, the former making him invisible, while the latter gave him power to perform his fairy tricks, whereby he was enabled to punish his pursuers, and keep himself and columbine safe out of their clutch.
“Well, Sir, I need not say how we have changed all this, nor how much, to my thinking, we have changed it for the worse. What story there is now-a-days is no longer told in dumb show; I suppose our pantomimists are not clever enough for that. Conversation is no longer carried on by gesture, or in cases of extreme emergency by scrolls. Instead of this, burlesque writers are paid to put bad puns in very much worse verse, and with this mixture are the public nightly dosed, without, I think, their being very much the better for it. Moreover, Sir, the dairies are of far less account now than they were, and their influence on the love-tale is not half so well defined. Indeed, our children’s faith in them must oft be sadly shaken, by seeing the good fairy do the bad one’s work, and having helped the lovers to their happy change of life, change their persecutors also to continue to torment them. Then, on the principle of quantity making up for quality, pantomimists now-a-days appear in ‘double companies;’ so that besides a brace of harlequins and columbines, we get a pair of pantaloons and a couple of bad clowns. Novel nondesctipts called ’sprites,’ too, come bounding on unbidden, and twist and twirl about until one’s brain whirls at the sight of them: while, to put a climax on these modern improprieties, there sometimes comes a creature called a Harlequina, whose ears, if I were Columbine, I certainly should box!
“But to my mind, Sir, by far the worst part of the business is that the Hot Poker is now virtually abolished, and the good old Comic Clown has ceased almost to exist. It is true that the hot poker still lingers on some stages, but alas! in modern hands it is a dull and pointless instrument. No longer is it heated in the fire of ancient wit, no longer is it used to poke a joke with any point in it. But ah! your good old Comic Clown, Sir, could wield it to some purpose. In his hands it was always safe to bring the house down. Every time he used it he was sure to get a roar. When he tickled pantaloon with it, I have split my sides with laughing, and have nearly died to see him take it up by the hot end and try to put it in his pocket. What fun there was moreover in the way in which he walked; his hands in his wide pockets (like our young swells with their ‘pegtops’), and his toes so much turned in that one fancied he was born so, and that an act of surgery would be required to turn them out. How comically clever too he always was in thieving, and in making his excuse when detected in the act! Your modern clown steals things as though they really were his own, or at least as if he had a perfect right to take them. He does his highway robberies with brutal force and clumsiness, and thinks all the fun colonists in the amount of cuffs he gives people.
“But not so did Grimaldi, and those good old-fashioned clowns who studied in his school. When they picked a pocket they did it like a pick-pocket, and showed plainly that they feared the law was at their heels. They preached too quite a sermon on the silliness of thieving, in the tortures which they suffered through possession of their plunder, and their ineffective struggles to conceal it. Many a budding thief, I think, must have been deterred from blossoming, by seeing how Grimaldi was worried with the warming-pan he had contrived to steal, but couldn’t make away with: how in despair he’d try to hide it in his all-pouching pocket, and what an utter fool he looked when, having left the handle our, he was dragged away to prison by it.
“But, alas! Poor Joey Yorick! thy shade no longer visits us. Thy mantle hath long since been torn to bits by rival clowns, and scarcely a square inch of it on any of them (if we expect, perhaps, Mr. Leclerq at the Haymarket) is visible. Almost the last shred I have seen was on the shoulders of Tom Matthews; but Tom is now Old Tom, and cannot play the fool with such spirit as he could. I saw him t’other day (another new-fangled idea! they play pantomimes by day, now!) in Jack and the Beanstalk, but he was only man enough to take the part of an old woman, and I fear he won’t again appear in his clown’s petticoats. He sang “Hot Codlins” in a way, though, that made me mindful of the past, and his efforts to amuse me were vastly more successful than those of Mr. Flexmore, who later in the piece did his best (or worst) to imitate him. Mr. F., I fancy, is a student in the French school, which as a Briton I, of course, put far below the British. To my thinking, French clownism partakes less of the comic that the acrobatic element: and as I like to go to theatres not to wonder but to laugh, I confess that I prefer our good old English style of fooling. Clowns like Mr. Flexmore are agile and can dance; but to my mind a mere posturer is not a pantomimist, and dancing-hornpipes is no more the business of a clown than singing nigger-songs is the vocation of a bishop.
“No, no, Mr. Punch. Our good old Comic Clown is a British institution, and Monsieur Pierrot must not be permitted to supplant him. If we allow this innovation, we shall next find that our pantomimes are ‘taken from the French,’ and that, Sir, to my thinking, would eternally disgrace us. A pantomime at Christmas is a good old English dish, and ought to be served up in the good old English fashion. The clown should do his antics after the antique, and not attempt to flavour them with any modern French sauce. I have no wish to see bouilli take the place of our roast beef, and would as soon employ a foreigner to get me up a pantomime, as I would hire a French cook to make me a plum pudding. Your Pierrot can grimace and kick his legs about, I grant; but my palate has been trained to relish good substantial English jokes, and I own I have no liking for Pierrot’s foreign kick-shaws. Give me, I say, the fine old Joe Grimaldi style of clowning, and let me still enjoy my butter slide and my hot poker. Gorgeous transformation scenes will never, to my taste, supply the want of tricks; nor will a scanty diet of what should be fun and frolic be made up for by a glut of that is now bad gas and glitter.
“I remain, Sir, yours,
“An Englishman, and One of the Old Sort.”
Back to Colouring the Truth. <<< — >>> Next to March, 03
