Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/384

372[March 20, 1869] to find with the costumes of any of the dramatic company. Neither was there anything in the proceedings of the clowns calling for extraordinary remark.

Your Commissioner deems it needless to multiply examples of his experience. In Hoxton, he found another great Theatre, admirably designed, built, and managed. Several pantomimes are on his list; but one was so like another, that his Shoreditch report may stand for all. They were inoffensive, decorous, and carefully done.

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Commissioner's researches in the region of burlesque remain. He is unable to approach this portion of his subject with any great degree of satisfaction. Your Commissioner, yielding to pressure from hungry boxkeepers, became the purchaser of several "books of the burlesque." Bitterly does he regret the shillings thus expended: tearfully does he caution the public against so fatal an error. He offers the solemn warning from the depths of his dismal experience: Listen, but do not read. As burlesque was a dozen years ago, so is it now. The same jokes, the same situations, the same business, occasionally the same stories. With each successive repetition the thing appears to have become weaker, until a point has been reached beyond which Your Commissioner trusts that the force of feebleness can no further go. As the burlesque writers have, in most cases, gone to the Music Hall for their music, so occasionally they appear to have adopted the style of the gentlemen who provide words for the "comiques." Your Commissioner, but for his regard for your Lordship's feelings, could quote from his collection of books of burlesques, effusions here and there, in comparison with which even the ditty of Tommy Dodd, or Up in a Balloon, can claim a sort of literary merit. This deplorable state of things appears to be, in some way, the Nemesis inseparable from burlesque, and not the result of incompetence in the authors, inasmuch as many of those gentlemen have done, and still do, real good work in other departments of art, dramatic and otherwise.

Burlesques undoubtedly rely largely on the introduction, by the lady members of the company, of very vigorous dancing; the flourishing of green satin boots is a most important element in their success. But the "break-down" and the "walk round", though almost always slangy and occasionally disagreeable, cannot with any fairness or reason be called indecent. There are very many more of such dances than was once the case; and many charming young ladies figure in tights and little boots, who have nothing whatever to do with the subject matter of the burlesque, until the particular scene occurs in which their dancing powers are called into action. They are engaged, in fact, to dance and to look well. At the New Goahead Theatre this matter particularly impressed Your Commissioner, and it became distinctly clear to him that the burlesque at this house is a "leg piece." But leg pieces are not the invention of the present epoch, and Your Commissioner has faint remembrance of an Opera House near the Haymarket, in which, and an Omnibus-Box from which, such things have been seen ere now by some of your Lordship's friends. However glad he would be to have a little more humour and good acting, and a little less reliance on bold dancing and costume, he does not think the present state of things justificatory of any special hysterical outbreak in behalf of the public morals.

That the true spirit of burlesque is extinct, and that the theatre possesses no artists capable of presenting a burlesque picture, carefully and humorously touched, Your Commissioner denies. The performance of a travesty of one of the masterpieces of German romanticism, some few months back, was marked by an extraordinary whimsicality and drollery on the part of the gentleman principally concerned, and by a refined humour and most captivating grace and elegance on that of the lady, that would alone have been sufficient refutation of any such statement. Neither has the excellent fooling attending the adventures of one Captain Crosstree escaped Your Commissioner's grateful notice. Some of our best comedians occasionally play in burlesque, and, though frequently placed in circumstances unworthy of their powers, they have the Art to bring out good results from unpromising materials. And it is a noteworthy fact that of the early members of the excellent company which made the Feathers Theatre the resort of lovers of comedy, two at least began their London stage career in burlesque, and for some time were not suspected by their audiences to possess any higher order of talent. Again, Your Commissioner is of opinion that the public quickly find out what is good, and that, irrespective of the number of legs on view, they will go and see it.

Your Commissioner, to sum up, begs to state that he has observed the skirts of