Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/385

Charles Dickens] the ladies of the ballet. Some were voluminous; some were scanty; some were short; some—not many—long. Some were stiff and expansive; others had to make up in spangles, what they lacked in starch. Some were whisked about in conventional ballet figures; others, passed across the stage, or manœuvred on it in marches and processions. Of the ladies wearing these various costumes, some were elderly. Those figured in the background. Some were mere children. Active young women bounded over the stage, and threaded their corkscrew path among their humbler sisters, apparently oblivious of all else; and little mites of girls danced their infantine boleros close to the footlights, and with eyes fixed immovably on the conductor's baton. Princes, also of all ages (and some of remarkably prepossessing appearance), have been passed in review by Your Commissioner. Stout princes, lean princes, tall princes, short princes; princes in mauve, in red, in blue, in green; princes differing from one another in every respect, except that they were almost all clad in doublet and hose, and that they had all been to a Music Hall or two, and had brought away some of the popular airs of the day. All the princes danced; hornpipe, clog dance, break-down, champion jig, or what not.

Your Commissioner now, recalling his experiences, begs to say that he is unable to report the existence of stage indecency, such as is suggested by your Lordship's circular. If the ordinary stage dress of a ballet girl, and of a stage prince, be improper, then the stage swarms with improprieties, and has so swarmed for many years. If it be asserted that less attention is given to public decency, in the costumes in question, at the present time, than has for years and years been the case, Your Commissioner begs totally to deny the fact. If it be intended to be conveyed that exhibitions are commonly to be witnessed in the pantomimes and burlesques of the day, which a man should think twice about taking the ladies of his family to see, Your Commissioner, with all respect for the remarks in the press and "other sources," on which your Lordship's strictures are founded, respectfully but uncompromisingly and firmly says that it is not so.

Certain managers, plunging eagerly into print, and commenting on your Lordship's circular, assumed that the facts were as your Lordship's informants stated them, and immediately fell foul of the public, by whom improprieties were encouraged. If by this it were meant that the public taste is becoming so vitiated and debased as to call for questionable exhibitions on the boards of a theatre, Your Commissioner enters against any such hardy representation his energetic protest. Any manager who may think it well to try the experiment, and to pander to this supposed depraved taste, will soon have ample leisure to meditate on the vanity of earthly things in the seclusion of Whitecross-street.

The really disgraceful exhibition of a low French dancing company at a London theatre last year, might have called justly for your Lordship's attention. It was so little relished by the audience, that it speedily had to be transplanted to more congenial soil. The lesson has probably been taken to heart, for nothing of the sort has been attempted this year.

Your Commissioner thinks that your Lordship may take heart of grace, and that, after all, the public may be trusted. At the same time he thinks it will do no harm to any one, either before or behind the footlights, to know that your Lordship's department is on the alert, and that any breach of public decorum will be sternly repressed. But he submits, in justice to all concerned, that on the next occasion on which your Lordship deems it necessary to interfere, you should point out exactly what it is that has moved your Lordship to action, and should take the earliest opportunity of proving to the offending manager that the Lord Chamberlain's rebuke is no brutum fulmen. So will the public learn what it is that they ought to avoid, and so will innocent managers, untouched by your Lordship's anger, reap the reward of their virtuous actions.

all the dark corners into which the human soul retires when it has some doubtful business on hand, some of the very darkest and most unpleasant are found to be those selected for making a will. Think of the thousands of furious fathers "cutting off" their children for some marriage disapproved of; giving out that they are asserting paternal rights—in reality, revenging themselves because of thwarted ambition and greedy hopes. Think of the line of old sinners darning up their wicked lives with bequests to hospitals and charities, to which they would not give a shilling till what they have is no longer theirs. Think of the lurid death-bed scenes, the act delayed until almost too late; the cormorants crowding round, the lawyers and clergy waiting the interval of in-