Our Stage and Its Critics | Page 5

laugh
deserved by it. Captain Dorvaston was supposed to read a passage from
The Special Monthly Journal, to this effect: "The shield bore for device
a bar sinister, with _fleur-de-lys rampant_"; then he said, "That ain't
heraldry." Lady Huntworth replied, "Yes, it is; Family Heraldry," and
he laughed. The passage in the play brought forward vividly the
thought that those who really live in the aristocratic world may smile at
our high-life dramas just as they do at the stories that appear
concerning the nobility in obscure "family" papers. There is, and during
a long time has been, a mania among playwrights for putting
aristocratic characters upon the stage. It may be that this is due to the
snobbishness of players, who, in comedy, love to represent a lord: they
can be kings and queens only in tragedies; or to that of the audience,
which likes to see the representation of the nobility; or, again, it may be
caused by the snobbishness of the dramatist and his wish to suggest that
he knows all about the "upper succles."
It need not be assumed that we are much worse in this respect than our
neighbours across that Channel which some desire to have destroyed
and so nullify the famous John of Gaunt speech. In books and plays the
Gallic writers are almost as fond of presenting the French aristocracy as
are our dramatists and novelists of writing works concerning the British
Peerage. Even putting the actual peerage aside, the question is

important, whether the pictures in fiction--particularly in drama--of
what one may call Belgravia or Mayfair are correct. We critics hardly
know; and it may be a solecism to suggest that the same applies to the
studies of the Faubourg St Germain. Perhaps that famous faubourg has
lost its distinction.
The question may seem a little difficult yet must be asked: How do our
dramatists and the French manage to get a first-hand study of the real
aristocracy? Of course, nowadays, there are a large number of houses
owned by people with titles, and sometimes very noble titles, which
can easily be penetrated. Speaking quite apart from politics, one may
say that the British aristocracy year by year makes itself cheaper and
cheaper, losing thereby its title to existence. The city clerk can do better
than Dick Swiveller, and decorate his bed-sitting room with a
photographic gallery of _décolletées_ duchesses, and bare-legged
ladies of noble family, and he is able to obtain a vast amount of
information, part of it quite accurate, concerning their doings.
Yet, even when we get far higher than the city clerk, and reach the
fashionable playwright, to say nothing of the dramatic critic, there are
mysteries unexplorable. There is a Lhassa in Mayfair, our efforts to
attain which are Burked.
A big Bohemian, sporting "smart-set," Anglo-American, South African
millionaire society exists which has in it a good many people
acknowledged by Debrett, and this it is quite easy to enter. There are a
score or so of peers, and twice the number of peeresses, as well as
smaller fry, possessing titles by birth or marriage, with whom it is not
difficult, and not always desirable, to become acquainted. The real
aristocracy looks askance at them. When we see pictures of these, or
studies on the French stage of the titled faiseurs, or _rastaquouères_,
we know that they may be correct, and indeed the figures in them have
become to such an extent despecialised that we can judge of the
truthfulness of the study by the simple process of assuming that they do
not possess any titles at all.
Still, there remains a world beyond, where, to some extent at least,
manners and ideas are different from those of the upper-middle-class,

or the middle-middle-class, to whichever it may be that our craft
belongs. People will recollect Thackeray's remarks concerning the
impossibility of getting to know the real domestic life of your French
friends; whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the
essential unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and
even untitled county families of the land. It is said that there still exist
some great ladies who have not cheapened themselves by allowing
their photographs to be published in the sixpenny papers. Yet our
dramatists, or some at least, seem to think that a play is vulgar unless
amongst the dramatis personae one can find a lord or two.
Perhaps indolence is their excuse. You call a character the Duke of
Smithfield, and thereby save yourself much trouble; you need not
explain that he is rich, or how he came to be rich, or why he has no
work to do. You have ready-made for you the supposition of a mass of
details as to manner and prejudices. If the heroine's father