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Most of these representations, at any rate in the earlier years with which we are concerned, were short realistic farces of low life composed in dialectal verse.
He made a translation of Tacitus, and wrote several farces and comedies, among which may be mentioned The Apprentice; The Spouter; The Upholsterer; The Way to Keep Him; and All in the Wrong. He also wrote three tragedies, namely, The Orphan of China; The Grecian Daughter; and Arminius.
I have never forgotten those performances, and laugh now when I think of the knight who shouted to his servant Kasperle, "Fear my thread!" Or of that same Kasperle, when he gave his wife a tremendous drubbing with a stake, and then inquired, "Want another ounce of unburned wood- ashes, my darling?" Paula was very fond of these farces.
The uncleanliness that results from heat and indolence, the obsequious slavishness of the common people, contrasted with their loquacious impertinence, the sensuality of their hosts of monks, nay the gluttony even of their begging friars, their ignorant adoration of the rags and rotten wood which they themselves dress up, the protection afforded to the most atrocious criminals if they can but escape to a mass of stone which they call sacred, the little horror in which they hold murder, the promptness with which they assassinate for affronts which they want the spirit to resent, their gross buffooneries religious and theatrical, the ridiculous tales told to the vulgar by their preachers, and the improbable farces which are the delight of the gentle and the simple, all these, and many other things of a similar nature, seem to degrade them below rational creatures.
Let any man of probity venture to force his way into one of these dens of thieves and see how he will fare! It is a comic thing that the gangs of jobbers consider that they have a prescriptive right to plunder at large, and their air of aggrieved virtue when they are challenged by a person whom they call an "interloper" is among the most droll and humiliating farces that may be seen in life.
Ah, poor little lady of Elfland! poor little Undine, with a soul wakened to suffering! "Clumsy, very clumsy!" she rebuked him. "I see that you are accustomed to prepare your lies in advance, Mr. Woods. As an extemporaneous liar you are very clumsy. Men don't propose by mistake except in farces.
His first employment was connected with the stage, and his business was to assist the writers of farces. After that, he took to giving lessons in a gallery attached to a house, until his commentary on "The Smyrna" so brought him into notice, that the following lines were written on him: Uni Crassitio se credere Smyrna probavit. Desinite indocti, conjugio hanc petere.
It is well to be able to realise that contact with the Dickens world is almost like a physical contact; it is like stepping suddenly into the hot smells of a greenhouse, or into the bleak smell of the sea. We know that we are there. Let any one read, for instance, one of the foolish but amusing farces in Dickens's first volume.
Just as Mark Twain began by writing comic copy which contained no prophesy of a masterpiece like 'Huckleberry Finn, so Molière was at first the author only of semi-acrobatic farces on the Italian model in no wise presaging 'Tartuffe' and the 'Misanthrope. Just as Molière succeeded first of all in pleasing the broad public that likes robust fun, and then slowly and step by step developed into a dramatist who set on the stage enduring figures plucked out of the abounding life about him, so also has Mark Twain grown, ascending from the 'Jumping Frog' to 'Huckleberry Finn, as comic as its elder brother and as laughter-provoking, but charged also with meaning and with philosophy.
"I can't see anything to laugh at," said Dale sturdily. And he couldn't. There are thousands of bright, flame-like human beings constituted like that. Life spreads out before them one of its most side-splitting, topsy-turvy farces and they see in it nothing to laugh at. To Dale the affair had been as serious and lacking in the fantastic as the measles.
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