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The plays were generally burlesques, for the Arab has a keen sense of humor and greatly appreciates a joke. Most of the puns were too involved for me to follow, but there was always a certain amount of slap-stick comedy that could be readily understood.
It is not possible to say whether these external displays are relics of barbarism or are enduring necessities of human nature. The fickleness of men in costume in a manner burlesques their shifty and uncertain taste in literature. A book or a certain fashion in letters will have a run like a garment, and, like that, will pass away before it waxes old.
The melody of jazz, the tin pan ghosts of Chopin, Tchaikowsky, Old Black Joe, Liszt and Mumbo Magumbo, jungle troubadour of the Congo, come whinnying out from under the pendant derby. The dancers on the cabaret floor close their eyes and grin to themselves. The cornet kids them along. When they grow sad it burlesques their sorrow. The cornet laughs at them.
Another work, pub. in 1835, is Specimens of the Early Poetry of France. Poet and translator, succeeded to an embarrassed estate, which his happy-go-lucky methods did not improve, wrote burlesques on Virgil and Lucian, and made an excellent translation of Montaigne's Essays, also a humorous Journey to Ireland. C. was the friend of Izaak Walton, and wrote a second part of The Complete Angler.
"It was on this paper, the 'Hannibal Journal'," says his biographer, Mr. Albert B. Paine, "that young Sam Clemens began his writings burlesques, as a rule, of local characters and conditions usually published in his brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble on his return.
That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who like their fellow creatures it must always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own burlesques.
The best plays no longer found decent representatives for any but one or two of their first parts; the pieces of more serious character and higher pretension as dramatic works were supplanted by burlesques and parodies of themselves; the school of acting of the Kembles, Young, the Keans, Macready, and their contemporaries, gave place to no school at all of very clever ladies and gentlemen, who certainly had no pretension to act tragedy or declaim blank verse, but who played low comedy better than high, and lowest farce best of all, and who for the most part wore the clothes of the sex to which they did not belong.
As for the burlesques themselves, they were nothing, the performers personally everything.
The original was in one of Burley's broad, coarse, but telling burlesques, strained fine through Randal's more polished satire. It was capital. Harley smiled, and lifted his eyes to Randal. The unlucky plagiarist's face was flushed, the beads stood on his brow.
They were all young together if they pleased themselves, they were pretty sure to please their readers. Often they wrote of one another squibs and burlesques, which gratified the Comstock far more than mere news. It was just the school to produce Mark Twain. The new arrival found acquaintance easy.
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