Part 2
Amateurs are very fond of “A Wonderful Woman,” but we can not see much in it. “The Wonder” is very picturesque. It is one of the plays which plays itself; and the Spanish costumes are beautiful. The famous comedies, “My Awful Dad,” “Woodcock’s Little Game,” and “The Liar,” should be studied very thoroughly by observation and by book before being attempted by amateurs. The “Little Game” has two very hard parts to fill, Mrs. Colonel Carver and Woodcock; still it has been done moderately well. For a parlor comedy, “The Happy Pair” is a great favorite; and “Box and Cox” can be done by anybody, and is always funny. Music helps along wonderfully, as witness the immortal “Pinafore,” which has been played by amateurs to admiration for hundreds of admiring audiences.
A stage manager is indispensable. In getting up ambitious plays in a city, which the courageous amateur sometimes attempts, an actor from the theatre is generally hired to “coach” the neophytes. In the country, some intelligent friend should do this, and he can properly be arbitrary. It is a case for an absolute monarchy. The stage manager must hear his company read the play over first, and tell John faithfully if he is better fitted for the part of the lackey rather than that of the lover. He must disabuse Seraphina of the belief that she either looks or can play the _ingenu_, and relegate her to the part of the housekeeper. We all have our natural and acquired capabilities for various parts, and can do no other.
Then, after reading the part, comes the rehearsal; and this is the crucial test. The players must study, rehearse, rehearse, study, and not be discouraged if they grow worse rather than better. There is always a part lagging, and the dress rehearsal is invariably a discouraging thing. But that is a most excellent and advantageous discouragement if it inspire the actors to new efforts. Nothing can spoil a private theatrical attempt like conceit and self-satisfaction. The art is as difficult a one as playing on the violin; and, although an amateur may learn to play pretty well, the distance between him and a professional is as great as that between an amateur violinist and Vieuxtemps. The amateur must remember this fact.
“Acting proverbs” is an ingenious way of suggesting an idea by its component parts rather than stating it outright. The parts are not written, but merely talked over, and are often done by clever young people on the spur of the moment. It is well, however, to consult beforehand as to the argument of the play. The books are full of little plays written upon such proverbs as “All is not Gold that Glitters,” “Honor among Thieves,” “All is Fair in Love and War,” etc. But we advise young people to take up less well-known proverbs, and to write their own plays. They might learn one or two as a sort of exercise, but the fresh outcrop of their own originality will be much better. The same may be said with the acting of charades.
A dramatic charade is a very ingenious thing, and a very neat little play in four acts can be made from the word AB-DI-CATE. A B, of course, presents a school scene. And at a watering place, if some witty man or woman will represent the schoolmaster or schoolmistress, all the pupils can be the grown men and women who are well known. The entrance of a fashionable mamma, her instantaneous effect on the severity of the teacher, the taking off the fool’s-cap from the head of Master Tommy, who has been in disgrace--all will cause laughter and an opportunity for local jokes. This is Act I. Di can be represented by the _dyeing_ process of a barber who has to please many customers; or “The _die_ is cast”; or an apposite allusion to Walter Scott’s “_Die_ Vernon”; or some comico-tragico scene of “I can but _die_.” This is Act II. Cate, to “_cater_,” “_Kate_”--for bad spelling is permitted--all these are in order. This is Act III. The last act can be the splendid pageant of a Turkish _Abdication_, in which a sultan abdicates in favor of his son. All the camel’s-hair shawls, brilliant turbans, and jewelry of the house and neighborhood can here be introduced with effect.
Charades in which negroes, Irish or German people, or anybody with a dialect, enter in and form a part, are very amusing if the boys of the family have a genius for mimicry. Amateur minstrels are very funny. The getting up of a party of white men as black men is, however, attended with expense. The gift of singing a comic song is highly appreciated in the family circle of amateur dramatists, and a little piece with songs is very sure to be acceptable.
If every member of the party will do what he can, without any false shame, or any egotistical desire to outdo the others, if the ready-witted will do what they can to help the slow-going, and if the older members of the family will help along, these amusements will cheer many a winter’s evening, many a long rainy week, and will improve all who are connected with them; for memory and elocution, good manners and a graceful bearing, are all included in the playing of charades, proverbs, and the little dramas.
IV.
TABLEAUX VIVANTS.
We now come to one of the most artistic of all Home Amusements--the _Tableau vivant_.
Lady Hamilton amused the people of her age, all over Europe, by playing in a parlor very striking living pictures. All she asked was a corner of the room, a heavy curtain behind her, and a few shawls and turbans. Being a beautiful and graceful woman, with the dramatic instinct, she gave imitations of celebrated statues and pictures, and was no doubt aided by some very ingenious painting, which she knew how to apply to her own fair face. The art she discovered is certainly worth trying in the present age as an amusement.
The preparations for good tableaux should be somewhat elaborate. A vista should be built and lined with dark-colored cloth; lights should fall from the top, sides, and front, so as to avoid shadows. The groups should be striking, the colors clear, and the attitudes simple. Sometimes there are such wonderful and unpremeditated effects from these living pictures that artists hold up their hands in despair; more often they are ruined by shadows; the lights are not well arranged, and the whole effect lacks elevation and meaning. It is difficult to arrange a crowded tableau, but it can be done.
The principle of a picture--a pyramidal form--should be observed closely in tableau. To secure this desirable object the persons in the background must stand on elevations. Boxes covered with dark cloth, so as to be unnoticeable, are the best of all devices, and the effect of any object held up in the hand, as a scepter, a bird, a distaff, or a wreath, must be carefully noted, as it may throw a shadow on the picture in the background. There never was, or could be, a tableau which did not have some weak spot, and these shadows are the faults which most easily beguile; but they can be avoided.
A group of Puritans make into many very striking pictures. The costume is beautiful and becoming; red cloth can be laid on the table or floor to set off the grays; and the many picturesque incidents in our early history form very pleasing subjects. It is a beautiful dress for women and a dignified one for men--that gray dress and high ruff, that broad hat, and plain, long gown. A group of young people might take a winter’s amusement out of reading up the Puritan annals, and giving at the Academy or in their own homes a series of Puritan tableaux.
A tableau can be given in parlors separated by folding-doors; but they are not by any means as good as those for which a stage, vista and footlights, flies and side-lights, are arranged. If there is a large unused room, where these properties can stand, the result is very much better. There should be a gauze curtain or one of black tarlatan, which should have no seams in it, and this curtain should hang in front of the stage all the time. The drop-curtain must be outside of this. The gauze curtain serves as a sort of varnish to the picture, and adds to the illusion.
Although the pure white light of candles, gas, kerosene, or lime-light is the best for tableaux, very pretty effects are produced by the introduction of colored lights, such as can be produced by the use of nitrate of strontia, chlorate of potash, sulphuret of antimony, sulphur, oxymuriate of potassa, metallic arsenic, and pulverized charcoal. Muriate of copper makes a bluish-green fire, and many other colors can be obtained by a little study of chemistry. Here are some simple recipes:
To make a _red fire_.--Five ounces nitrate of strontia, dry, one and a half ounces finely-powdered sulphur. Take five drachms chlorate of potash and four drachms sulphuret of antimony and powder them separately in a mortar; then mix them on paper, and, having mixed the other ingredients, previously powdered, add these last, and rub the whole together on paper. In use, mix a little spirits of wine with the powder, and burn in a flat iron plate or pan.
A _green fire_ may be made by powdering finely and mixing well thirteen parts flour of sulphur, five parts oxymuriate of potassa, two parts metallic arsenic, three parts pulverized charcoal, seventy-seven parts nitrate of baryta; dry it carefully, powder, and mix the whole thoroughly. A polished reflector fitted on one side of the pan in which this is burned will concentrate the light and cast a brilliant green luster on the figures. A bluish-green fire may be produced by burning muriate of copper finely powdered and mixed with spirits of wine. These fires smell unpleasantly in the drawing-room; and equally good effects may almost always be produced by colored globes, if the light is not needed too quickly.
Sulphate of copper, when dissolved in water, will give a beautiful _blue_ color. The common red cabbage gives three colors. Slice the cabbage and pour boiling water on it; when cold, add a small quantity of alum, and you have _purple_. Potash dissolved in the water will give a brilliant _green_. A few drops of muriatic acid will turn the cabbage-water into a _crimson_.
Then, again, if a ghostly look be required, mix common salt with spirits of wine in a metal cup and set it upon a wire frame over a spirit-lamp. When the cup becomes heated, and the spirits of wine ignite, the other lights in the room should be extinguished, and that of the spirit-lamp shaded in some way. The result will be that the whole group will become like the witches in Macbeth,
“That look not like the inhabitants of the earth, But yet are of it.”
This burning of common salt produces a very weird effect. It seems that salt has some other properties than the conservative, preserving, hospitable kind of quality which legend and the daily needs of mankind have ascribed to it.
A very fine and artistic set of tableaux can be gotten up by reference to such a great work as “Boydell’s Shakespeare,” if it happens to be at hand. Also a study of fine engravings, such as one finds in the “National Academy.” If these books are not attainable, almost any pictorial magazine will furnish subjects. Or, if imagination is consulted, construct a series out of Waverley, or from the but too well known scenes of the French Revolution, or from George Eliot’s delightful “Romola”--a book full of remarkable pictures, with the additional charm of the old Florentine dress. Sometimes a very impressive poem is given in tableaux, like Tennyson’s “Princess,” or, the “Dream of Fair Women.” Then there are many artistic but rather horrible surprises, as “The Head of John the Baptist,” which can be “cut off” admirably by an intervening table, and so on; but nothing is so good as a study of the fine groups of the best painters.
Venetian scenes, from Titian’s and Tintoretto’s pictures, can be admirably represented in tableaux. The Italian wealth of color is always impressive; and as engravings of these pictures are attainable, it is well to represent them. Roman scenes are very effective, and especially as Alma Tadema arranges them for us, with his fine feeling for the antique.
The humor of Hogarth, aided as it is by the picturesque dress of his day, can be represented in a tableau. But without some such aids humor is generally lost in a tableau. There is not time for it. Some of Darley’s groups, as, for instance, the illustrations of “Rip Van Winkle,” are admirable, and would seem to contradict this statement, for they are full of fun; but then--they are wonderfully well dressed. That early Revolutionary dress, borrowed in part from the days of Queen Anne, is very picturesque.
If there is some one in the group whose fine sense of the proprieties of art can be trusted, the allegorical can be attempted. But the danger is that the allegorical in art is generally ridiculous. Faith, Hope, and Charity, Mercy and Peace, are better anywhere than in pictures.
The grotesque is always lost in a tableau, where there seems to be a sort of æsthetic demand for the heroic, the refined, and the delicate. A double action may be presented with very good effect; as in some of those fancies of Retzsch and Ary Scheffer, where an angel bends over a sleeping child, or a group, unknown to the actors in front, is representing another picture behind. But the best effects are the simplest. One should not attempt too much. The old example, called “The Dull Lecture,” painted by Gilbert Stuart Newton, where a prosy old philosopher is reading aloud to a pretty girl who is fast asleep, is a case in point. That has been a favorite tableau for forty years, nor are its charms yet done away with. Tableaux from Dickens have only a moderate success, excepting, perhaps, the rather overdone “Christmas Carol.” The dress is wanting in color and character.
Tableaux in which animals are introduced are sometimes very effective, if stuffed bears and lions and tigers can be hired from a museum. A fine tableau was once composed, from a French print, of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon; but the camel on which that lofty lady arrived was a piece of scene-painting done by a very clever artist, and it would be difficult to improvise one.
V.
BRAIN GAMES.
We now come to the winter evening, and the pencil and paper.
It is a delightful feature of our modern civilization that books are very cheap, and that the poets are read by everybody. That would be a very barren house where one did not find Scott, Byron, Goldsmith, Longfellow, Tennyson, Browning, Bret Harte, and Jean Ingelow. Very few boys and girls can reach the age of sixteen without having committed to memory some immortal poem of one of these most popular poets.
Therefore there would be no embarrassment if we asked the members of any evening circle to write down three or four lines in the measure of “Evangeline,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “The Corsair,” “The Traveler,” “Marmion,” or “Hervé Riel,” “The Heathen Chinee,” or the pretty “Bird Song” of Jean Ingelow. Not a parody only, however, but a parody involving a certain idea or word.
In the great year of Coggia’s comet this game was thus played, and a young man was requested to speak of the comet in the style of “Mother Goose.” The result was as follows:
“Sing a song of Coggia-- Comet in the sky! Wonder if he’ll trouble us, Whip up you or I! When his tail is over, Then begin to crow; Four-and-twenty doctors, Tell us all you know!”
Another of the circle was directed to treat of the Wood Fire in the measure of Tennyson’s “May Queen.” The result was the following:
“If you’re snapping, snap out wisely, snap out wisely, burning wood! You would not snap so wildly if your drying had been good. Nor had I, sitting near you with the hearth-brush in my hand, Have found no peace in sitting, for fear of burning brand.”
This was declared to be too easy a game for such a wild and superfluous supply of brains, and, therefore, the word _Poker_ was pronounced to be an essential element of every future poem. Poor Browning and Longfellow, Bret Harte and Walter Scott, were mercilessly spitted on that poker. Much foolscap was spoiled, but much fun gained. Here is one of the poker successes:
“AFTER BYRON, WITH A POKER; ALSO AFTER DRINKING FLIP.
“Here, too, the Poker stands in brass! and fills The air around with safety! We inhale The ambrosial aspect which its heat instills (Part of its immortality) to Flip (That beer which is half drawn), within the cup We breathe, and its deep secrets dip. Who Flip can make--who cares where he may fail! Before its wide success let Heliogabalus turn pale.
“We drink, and turn away--we care not where! Fuzzled, and drunk with porter, till the head Reels with its fullness. There, for ever there, Stand thou in triumph, Poker, strong and red! We are thy captives, and thine ardor share. Away! there need no words, no terms precise, To say in loving accents, Flip-cup, thou art nice!”
To this class of Home Amusements belongs also the famous game of “Twenty Questions,” which was played so much at one time by the Cambridge professors that they declared that any subject should be reached in ten questions. The proper formula for this very intellectual game is this: Two parties are formed, the questioners and the answerers, the first having the privilege, after the word has been chosen, to inquire--
“Is your subject animal, vegetable, or mineral?”
“What is its size?”
“To what age does it belong?”
“Is it historical or natural?”
“Is it ancient or modern?”
“Is it a manufactured article?” etc.
The number of subjects which are _none_ of these, or which _are all three_, or which can not be defined in some way, is of course small. Thus, a Blush, a Smile, a Tear, an Echo, an Avalanche, a Drought, are all indescribable by the exact definitions of the above questions. But the questioner soon arrives at this negative, and begins a new series.
Perhaps one of the most puzzling of subjects is a “mummy.” It fulfills certain conditions, but not others; and the final question, “What is its use?” and the answer, “It is used for fuel,” though true--for the Arabs cook their dinners by them--does not at all cover the ground of the supposed use of a mummy. The shield of Achilles, the Hole in the Wall through which Pyramus and Thisbe kissed, have been asked and guessed! A Bat baffled even the most ingenious twenty questioners, while the Parlor into which the Spider invited the Fly was guessed.
It is a very intellectual and very amusing game, and those who play it should be as honest as possible in their answers. If puns and wordy equivoque are allowed, the game ceases to be legitimate.
Among games requiring memory and attention we may mention “Cross Purposes,” “The Horned Ambassador,” “I love my Love with an A,” “The Game of the Ring” (arithmetical), “The Deaf Man,” “The Goose’s History.” “Story Play” consists in putting a chosen word into a narrative so cleverly that it will not be readily guessed, although several people tell different stories with the chosen word several times repeated. The best way to play this is to have some odd word which is _not_ the word--like _Banana_--and use it several times; yet one’s own consciousness of the right word will often betray the story-teller. “The Dutch Conceit,” “My Lady’s Toilet,” “What is my Thought like?” “Scheherazade’s Ransom” are very pretty, and may be found in many Manuals of Games. This last deserves a description.
Three of the company sustain the parts of the Sultan, the Vizier, and the Princess Scheherazade. The Sultan takes his seat at the end of the room, and the Vizier then leads the Princess before him, with her hands bound behind her. The Vizier then makes a burlesque proclamation that the Princess, having exhausted all her stories, is about to be punished unless a sufficient ransom be offered. All the rest of the company then advance in turn and propose enigmas, which must be solved by the Sultan or Vizier; sing the first verse of a song, to which the Vizier must answer with the second verse; or recite any well-known piece of poetry in alternate lines with the Vizier. Forfeits must be paid either by the company when successfully encountered by the Sultan or Vizier, or by the Vizier when unable to respond to his opponents; and the game goes on till the forfeits amount to any specified number on either side. Should the company be victorious and obtain the greatest number of forfeits, the Princess is released, and the Vizier has to execute all the penalties that may be imposed upon him. If otherwise, the Princess is led to execution. For this purpose she is blindfolded, and seated on a low stool. The penalties for the forfeits, which should be previously prepared, are written on slips of paper and put in a basket, which she holds in her hands tied behind her. The owners of the forfeits advance and draw each a slip of paper. As each person comes forward, the Princess guesses who it is, and, if right, the person must pay an additional forfeit, the penalty for which is to be exacted by the Princess herself. When all the penalties have been distributed, the hands and eyes of the Princess are released, and she then superintends the execution of the various punishments that have been allotted to the company.
Another very good game is to send one of the company out, and as he comes in again to address him as the supposed character of Napoleon, a Russian emperor, Gustavus Adolphus, or some well-known character in history or fiction. For instance, a young lady leaves the room, and as she enters some one says:
“Charming and noble heroine, most generous and most faithful! we are glad to see you. How well you look, after all that has happened to you! Burned alive? Yes, I should say so; and all that you suffered before! How did you like wearing armor? and what do you think of ungrateful kings? How was it at home before you left----? Did you really see those visions? and how did St. ---- look? And, now that you are come back, will you ever be so generous and noble as to fight for _any_ cause except yourself?”
Of course, the young lady knows that she is Joan of Arc. But it is not necessary that character should be so plainly indicated, however, as in this example.
“The Echo” is another very pretty game. It is played by reciting some little story, which Echo is supposed to interrupt whenever the narrator pronounces certain words which recur frequently in his narrative. These words relate to the profession or trade of him who is the subject of the story. If, for example, the story is about a soldier, the words which would recur the most frequently would naturally be “Uniform,” “Gaiters,” “Chapeau bras,” “Musket,” “Plume,” “Pouch,” “Sword,” “Saber,” “Gun,” “Knapsack,” “Belt,” “Sash,” “Cap,” “Powder-flask,” “Accouterments,” and so on. Each one of the company, with the exception of the person who tells the story, takes the name of Soldier, Powder-flask, etc., except the name “Accouterments.” When the speaker pronounces one of these words, he who has taken it for his name ought, if the word has been said only once, to pronounce it twice; if it has been said twice, to pronounce it once. When the word “Accouterments” is uttered, the players--all except the soldier--ought to repeat again the word “Accouterments” either once or twice.
These games are amusing, as showing how defective a thing is memory, and how apt, when under fire, to desert us. It is also very queer to mark the difference of character exhibited by the players. The most unexpected revelations are made.