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The first thing Reggie did was to kick a tin and fall into a shell hole, where he was joined by Shorty. "Frightening rooks, son," he remarked kindly, "or rehearsing as a knockabout comedian? About twenty-five yards from here on our left is the German sap party that I am visiting to-night. I like 'em to know I'm coming." "Sorry, Shorty," muttered the delinquent. "I never saw the ruddy thing."
This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion.
He was too quick in repartee and drollery for a bourgeois, too "near to the bone" in point for an aristocrat, with his touch of the comedian and the peasant also. Besides, he was mysterious and picturesque, and this is alluring to women and to the humble, if not to all the world.
Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic comedian. Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth? 'You him! she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt. She laughed.
The curtain went down amidst rapturous applause. The dancer had left the stage, floating away into some sort of wonderfully-contrived nebulous background. Within a few moments, the principal comedian of the day was telling stories. Sir Timothy led them away. "But how on earth do you get all these people?" Lady Cynthia asked. "It is arranged for me," Sir Timothy replied.
He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored: his last temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs.
"Gatesboro' Arms," "Spread Eagle," "Royal Hotel," "Saracen's Head; very comfortable, centre of High Street, opposite the Town Hall," were shouted, bawled, whispered, or whined into his ear. "Is there an honest porter?" asked the Comedian, piteously. An Irishman presented himself. "And is it meself can serve your honour?" "Take this bundle, and walk on before me to the High Street."
After you folks built this make-believe shed and put the hay in, I s'pose some of my hens seen it and thought it would be a good place. So they made a nest there, and they've been layin' in it for the last few days." "More as a week, I should say!" declared Mr. Switzer in his best German comedian manner. "There were many eggs!"
Just as the tragedian is certain in his inmost soul that his proper rôle is light comedy, while the popular comedian is equally positive that he should be starring in the legitimate; so Farwell, harsh, dominant, impatient, brutal on occasion, a typical lone male of his species, knowing little of and caring less for the softer side of life, cherished a firm belief that his proper place was the exact centre of a family circle.
But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in certain characters in comedy, especially those which are a little extravagant, or which involve some notion repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit understanding with them; and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a party in the scene.
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