Part 24

There is one sort of girl to whom all this does no harm, and that is the girl who comes of a hard-working professional theatrical family, who has been decently brought up in the middle of it all from a child, whose father and mother are in the theatre, thoroughly respectable people, and as careful of their daughter s morals as though she were the niece of a bishop. Such a girl as this, if she remain on the stage, will be a tolerable actress, always sure of an engagement. She will marry a decent, respectable actor, of some one connected with theatricals, will bring up a family excellently, will be really religious without ostentation, will never lose her self-respect, and in her own way be perfectly domesticated, happy and contented. Or she may marry some one in a good social position: if so, she will quit the stage without regret, because she is not of the stuff of which great actresses are made; but she will look back on her theatrical experience with affection for her parents to whom she owed so much. She is neither Esther, nor Polly Eccles, nor is she in the position of the well-brought-up young lady we have been considering. But she is an admirable woman, in whatever station of life her lot may be cast, and not a bit of a snob.

For a young lady, travelling with a company would be simply impossible, unless accompanied by her mother, or by some trustworthy relative. A manageress might undertake the guardianship and execute the trust conscientiously. But this is an exceptional case.

There is another point, and a very important one, to be considered, and that is the artistic temperament. If a young lady of attractive personal appearance possesses histrionic talent, then in proportion to her talent will be her temperament. She will be impulsive, passionate, impressionable, self-willed, impatient of control, simple, confiding, and vain, but artistically vain, and desirous of applause. She will be illogical, inconsistent, full of contradictions, fond of variety, and unable to exist without excitement. It only requires her to be a genius to be duped by the first schemer that throws himself in her way.

So, when the theatrical profession is brought before you, my dear madam, as a calling for your daughter to follow, you see that on the one hand there is mediocrity and deterioration of character, and on the other success, at, probably, a ruinous price. This does not apply, and again I impress it on my readers, to those who are to the manner born. They will lead jog-trot lives, study their parts, make puddings, act mechanically every night, knit socks in the green-room, and be virtuous and happy to the end of their days. Their artistic temperament will not lead them very far astray, unless they have the _feu sacré_, and then, it is likely, they will make a hasty marriage, repent at leisure, and try to forget they ever bore a husband's name by making one for themselves. In some recent French romance an ex-actress is warning her daughter who has married a prince, against the fascinations of a young painter. The princess turns on her mother with, “Est ce ma faute à moi si j'ai dans les veines du sang d'artiste?” And the ex-comédienne feels the full force of her daughter's retort, which has in it a certain amount of truth. Public life has great dangers for young women of the artistic temperament: mothers cannot be always with them, and sheep-dogs are expensive and untrustworthy. Chance or ill-luck may bring your daughter, madam, to the stage, but you would not choose it for her, that is, the stage, being as it is, and as it is likely to be under the present conditions. When those conditions are altered for the better, it will be time enough for society to change its opinion on the subject.

But, it is urged, the present state of the stage is a vast improvement on the past; that the actor is a person of more consideration than formerly, and not necessarily tabooed from all society, but on the contrary, he is to be met in the very best drawing-rooms. It may be that a few, whom you may count on the fingers of both hands, have the _entrée_ to the best society. It may be so; I am not in a position to deny it. But their genius, or talent, and their unblemished reputation have combined to place them on that pedestal exalted above their fellows. But was it not always so? Have there not always been a privileged few among the actors, as among other citizens of the Great Republic of Art and Letters, who have been admitted to the assemblies of the great, and whose hospitality the great have condescended to accept in return? Go back thirty years and at least a dozen names of prominent actors and actresses will occur to us as having been received in the best society. Now, in their time, the number of West-end theatres was about one-third of what it is at the present day. Therefore, if five actors were received by society then, there should be fifteen received now. If there are not, the stage of to-day is socially on the same level with the stage of thirty years ago, and has not advanced a step; if the number of presentable actors is, nowadays, less, then the stage has retrograded. I cannot make out that there are more received than formerly. There are a few University men on the stage, men of birth and education, entitled to be received in good society. But now we are speaking of only a section of society, and are begging the original question.

And why, from the nature of the case, cannot the stage ever rank with the recognised professions? Because, as a means of earning a livelihood, that is as a mere employment, the stage is open to all the world. Unlike painting, literature, and music, it requires no special knowledge of any sort; it can be practised as well by the unlearned as, though not with the same facility, by the learned. It is a self-educating profession. Physical gifts, up to a certain point, will make up for deficiency in talent: but given talent, and with perseverance and application even for the most illiterate, success is certain. Given genius, then “reading and writing” seem to “come by nature,” and though there may always be a little difficulty with the spelling, yet triumph is sure and swift. The stage requires no matriculation; but for an actor of talent, who loves his art, there is no limit to his studies,—one helps another, one leads to another. As far as society is concerned, there should be no one more thoroughly qualified to play a leading part in the very highest, the most intellectual, and most cultivated society, than the actor or actress, who is rising in or who has reached the summit of “the profession.” Scarcely a subject can be named that is not, in its degree, almost essential—a strong word, but on consideration used correctly—to the perfection of the actor's art. A first-rate actor should be an admirable Crichton. The best preparation for the stage is, as I have elsewhere insisted, a thorough education. True, that it is so for every calling, but especially for the stage. To belong to the bar of England is an honor in itself, even though the barrister never gets a brief and could do nothing with it if he did. To belong to the stage of England is _not_ an honor in itself. To the genius, the talents, and the private worth of our eminent actors in the past and in the present, our stage owes its lustre. They owed nothing to the stage, the stage everything to them.

The desire to raise the social status of the actor so that the term actor shall be “synonymous with gentleman,” is worthy of all praise. To make it possible for young ladies of education to take to acting as a means of earning a livelihood, would be a great social benefit.

When a youth, well brought up, takes to the stage, he should not be immediately treated as a pariah. On the contrary, if ever there be a time in a young man's career when more than ever he stands in need of good home traditions, the companionship of his equals, and the encouragement of his superiors, it is when he has honestly chosen, as a means of earning his living, the stage as a profession. That, for evident reasons, it has been usually selected by the dissolute, the idle, and those to whom any restraint is distasteful, accounts to a great extent for the disrepute in which the stage has been held. Of course the statute-book and the puritanism of the seventeenth century have much to answer for in the popular estimate of the players. There is a strong leaven of Puritanism amongst us, and, in some respects, so much the better; but also among very excellent people of various religious opinions, there has been, and it exists now, a sort of vague idea that the stage has always been under the positive ban of the Church. In the temporary laws and regulations of different countries, enforced by narrow-minded men, civil or ecclesiastical, may be found the origin of this mistaken notion. The Church has never pronounced the stage the anathema. On the contrary, she has patronised the stage, and the first mimes who entered France from Italy rather resembled members of a religious order in their pious fervor, than actors of a later date in their laxity. If players were refused Christian burial, it was when they had neither lived nor died as even nominal Christians, and in such cases even “maimed rites” would savor of hypocrisy. In France the actors themselves were under this hallucination. M. Regnier tells us how in 1848 a deputation of comedians went to Monseigneur Affre to ask him to get the sentence of excommunication removed from the theatrical profession. “L'illustre prélat leur répondit qu'il n'y avait pas à la lever, parcequ'elle n'avait jamais été formulée, et que les comédiens français, comme les comédiens de tous les autres pays catholiques, pouvaient participer aux sacraments.”

It would be a comparatively easy task to trace the origin of this floating but perfectly false tradition, but I have already overrun the limit of this article. In the time of Louis XIII. the actors were excellent church-goers, had their children baptised, frequented the sacraments, and were on the best terms with curés of Paris; and it will be a consolation to those actors among us who, like the doll in the song, “pine for higher society” to be reminded, that the grand monarch himself did not disdain to stand god-father at the font to the first-born of Molière, and to do the like office to the third child of Domenico Biancolelli, the Italian harlequin.

Our leading actors and actresses of the present day will naturally strive, no less than those of the past, to do their best for the stage, and, in return, the patrons of the drama will do their best for them. But to claim for it, as its right, the social status of the recognised professions, and to be fussily indignant with society at large for refusing to acknowledge this groundless claim, is degrading to an art which should be as independent and as exalted as virtue, and content with virtue's reward.—_Fortnightly Review._

FOOTNOTES:

[38] The process of obtaining an engagement is the same for a lady as a gentleman, _i.e._ a visit to an agent's office, &c., &c. Here is an advertisement which evidently offers a rare chance:—

“Wanted, ladies of attractive appearance, with good singing voices. Can be received for long pantomime season. Dresses found. Salaried engagement (an exceptionable opportunity for clever amateurs desirous of adopting the profession).”

GO TO THE ANT.

In the market-place at Santa Fé, in Mexico, peasant women from the neighboring villages bring in for sale trayfuls of living ants, each about as big and round as a large white currant, and each entirely filled with honey or grape-sugar, much appreciated by the ingenuous Mexican youth as an excellent substitute for Everton toffee. The method of eating them would hardly command the approbation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. It is simple and primitive, but decidedly not humane. Ingenuous youth holds the ant by its head and shoulders, sucks out the honey with which the back part is absurdly distended, and throws away the empty body as a thing with which it has now no further sympathy. Maturer age buys the ants by the quart, presses out the honey through a muslin strainer, and manufactures it into a very sweet intoxicating drink, something like shandygaff, as I am credibly informed by bold persons who have ventured to experiment upon it, taken internally.

The curious insect which thus serves as an animated sweetmeat for the Mexican children is the honey-ant of the Garden of the Gods; and it affords a beautiful example of Mandeville's charming paradox that personal vices are public benefits—_vitia privata humana commoda_. The honey-ant is a greedy individual who has nevertheless nobly devoted himself for the good of the community by converting himself into a living honey-jar, from which all the other ants in his own nest may help themselves freely from time to time, as occasion demands. The tribe to which he belongs lives underground, in a dome-roofed vault, and only one particular caste among the workers, known as rotunds from their expansive girth, is told off for this special duty of storing honey within their own bodies. Clinging to the top of their nest, with their round, transparent abdomens hanging down loosely, mere globules of skin enclosing the pale amber-colored honey, these Daniel Lamberts of the insect race look for all the world like clusters of the little American Delaware grapes, with an ant's legs and head stuck awkwardly on to the end instead of a stalk. They have, in fact, realised in everyday life the awful fate of Mr. Gilbert's discontented sugar-broker, who laid on flesh and “adipose deposit” until he became converted at last into a perfect rolling ball of globular humanity.

The manners of the honey-ant race are very simple. Most of the members of each community are active and roving in their dispositions, and show no tendency to undue distension of the nether extremities. They go out at night and collect nectar or honey-dew from the gall-insects on oak-trees; for the gall-insect, like love in the old Latin saw, is fruitful both in sweets and bitters, _melle et felle_. This nectar they then carry home, and give it to the rotunds or honey-bearers, who swallow it and store it in their round abdomen until they can hold no more, having stretched their skins literally to the very point of bursting. They pass their time, like the Fat Boy in “Pickwick,” chiefly in sleeping, but they cling upside down meanwhile to the roof of their residence. When the workers in turn require a meal, they go up to the nearest honey-bearer and stroke her gently with their antennæ. The honey-bearer thereupon throws up her head and regurgitates a large drop of the amber liquid. (“Regurgitates” is a good word, which I borrow from Dr. McCook, of Philadelphia, the great authority upon honey-ants; and it saves an immense deal of trouble in looking about for a respectable periphrasis). The workers feed upon the drops thus exuded, two or three at once often standing around the living honey-jar, and lapping nectar together from the lips of their devoted comrade. This may seem at first sight rather an unpleasant practice on the part of the ants; but, after all, how does it really differ from our own habit of eating honey which has been treated in very much the same unsophisticated manner by the domestic bee?

Worse things than these, however, Dr. McCook records to the discredit of the Colorado honey-ant. When he was opening some nests in the Garden of the Gods, he happened accidentally to knock down some of the rotunds, which straightway burst asunder in the middle, and scattered their store of honey on the floor of the nest. At once the other ants, tempted away from their instinctive task of carrying off the cocoons and young grubs, clustered around their unfortunate companion, like street boys around a broken molasses barrel, and instead of forming themselves forthwith into a volunteer ambulance company, proceeded immediately to lap up the honey from their dying brother. On the other hand, it must be said, to the credit of the race, that (unlike the members of Arctic expeditions) they never desecrate the remains of the dead. When a honey-bearer dies at his post, a victim to his zeal for the common good, the workers carefully remove his cold corpse from the roof where it still clings, clip off the head and shoulders from the distended abdomen, and convey their deceased brother piecemeal, in two detachments, to the formican cemetery, undisturbed. If they chose, they might only bury the front half of their late relation, while they retained his remaining moiety as an available honey-bag: but from this cannibal proceeding ant-etiquette recoils in decent horror; and the amber globes are “pulled up galleries, rolled along rooms, and bowled into the graveyard, along with the juiceless heads, legs, and other members.” Such fraternal conduct would be very creditable to the worker honey-ants, were it not for a horrid doubt insinuated by Dr. McCook that perhaps the insects don't know they could get at the honey by breaking up the body of their lamented relative. If so, their apparent disregard of utilitarian considerations may really be due not to their sentimentality but to their hopeless stupidity.

The reason why the ants have taken thus to storing honey in the living bodies of their own fellows is easy enough to understand. They want to lay up for the future, like prudent insects that they are; but they can't make wax, as the bees do, and they have not yet evolved the purely human art of pottery. Consequently—happy thought—why not tell off some of our number to act as jars on behalf of the others? Some of the community work by going out and gathering honey; they also serve who only stand and wait—who receive it from the workers, and keep it stored up in their own capacious india-rubber maws till further notice. So obvious is this plan for converting ants into animated honey-jars, that several different kinds of ants in different parts of the world, belonging to the most widely distinct families, have independently hit upon the very self-same device. Besides the Mexican species, there is a totally different Australian honey-ant, and another equally separate in Borneo and Singapore. This last kind does not store the honey in the hind part of the body, technically known as the abdomen, but in the middle division which naturalists call the thorax, where it forms a transparent bladder-like swelling, and makes the creature look as though it were suffering with an acute attack of dropsy. In any case, the life of a honey-bearer must be singularly uneventful, not to say dull and monotonous; but no doubt any small inconvenience in this respect must be more than compensated for by the glorious consciousness that one is sacrificing one's own personal comfort for the common good of universal anthood. Perhaps, however, the ants have not yet reached the Positivist stage, and may be totally ignorant of the enthusiasm of formicity.

Equally curious are the habits and manners of the harvesting ants, the species which Solomon seems to have had specially in view when he advised his hearers to go to the ant—a piece of advice which I have also adopted as the title of the present article, though I by no means intend thereby to insinuate that the readers of this magazine ought properly to be classed as sluggards. These industrious little creatures abound in India: they are so small that it takes eight or ten of them to carry a single grain of wheat or barley; and yet they will patiently drag along their big burden for five hundred or a thousand yards to the door of their formicary. To prevent the grain from germinating, they bite off the embryo root—a piece of animal intelligence outdone by another species of ant, which actually allows the process of budding to begin, so as to produce sugar, as in malting. After the last thunderstorms of the monsoon the little proprietors bring up all the grain from their granaries to dry in the tropical sunshine. The quantity of grain stored up by the harvesting ants is often so large that the hair-splitting Jewish casuists of the Mishna have seriously discussed the question whether it belongs to the landowner or may lawfully be appropriated by the gleaners. “They do not appear,” says Sir John Lubbock, “to have considered the rights of the ants.” Indeed our duty towards insects is a question which seems hitherto to have escaped the notice of all moral philosophers. Even Mr. Herbert Spencer, the prophet of individualism, has never taken exception to our gross disregard of the proprietary rights of bees in their honey, or of silkworms in their cocoons. There are signs, however, that the obtuse human conscience is awakening in this respect; for when Dr. Loew suggested to bee-keepers the desirability of testing the commercial value of honey-ants, as rivals to the bee, Dr. McCook replied that “the sentiment against the use of honey thus taken from living insects, which is worthy of all respect, would not be easily overcome.”

There are no harvesting ants in Northern Europe, though they extend as far as Syria, Italy, and the Riviera, in which latter station I have often observed them busily working. What most careless observers take for grain in the nests of English ants are of course really the cocoons of the pupæ. For many years, therefore, entomologists were under the impression that Solomon had fallen into this popular error, and that when he described the ant as “gathering her food in the harvest” and “preparing her meat in the summer,” he was speaking rather as a poet than as a strict naturalist. Later observations, however, have vindicated the general accuracy of the much-married king by showing that true harvesting ants do actually occur in Syria, and that they lay by stores for the winter in the very way stated by that early entomologist, whose knowledge of “creeping things” is specially enumerated in the long list of his universal accomplishments.

Dr. Lincecum of Texan fame has even improved upon Solomon by his discovery of those still more interesting and curious creatures, the agricultural ants of Texas. America is essentially a farming country, and the agricultural ants are born farmers. They make regular clearings around their nests, and on these clearings they allow nothing to grow except a particular kind of grain, known as ant-rice. Dr. Lincecum maintains that the tiny farmers actually sow and cultivate the ant-rice. Dr. McCook, on the other hand, is of opinion that the rice sows itself, and that the insects' part is limited to preventing any other plants or weeds from encroaching on the appropriated area. In any case, be they squatters or planters, it is certain that the rice, when ripe, is duly harvested, and that it is, to say the least, encouraged by the ants, to the exclusion of all other competitors. “After the maturing and harvesting of the seed,” says Dr. Lincecum, “the dry stubble is cut away and removed from the pavement, which is thus left fallow until the ensuing autumn, when the same species of grass, and in the same circle, appears again, and receives the same agricultural care as did the previous crop.” Sir John Lubbock, indeed, goes so far as to say that the three stages of human progress—the hunter, the herdsman, and the agriculturist—are all to be found among various species of existing ants.