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Skip went on the stand, reveling in his first experience of fame, basking in the spot-light like a cheap actor, and acting very badly, yet well enough for the groundlings he amused. Jim and Charity underwent a martyrdom of ridicule during his testimony.
His gestures are designed not to impress, enrapture or englamour the musical groundlings, but to convey his sharply defined wishes to his men and transmit to them the flaming enthusiasm that consumes him. His motions are patiently sincere, almost unconscious. He enters carrying his baton under his right arm, like a riding crop. Orchestra and audience rise.
He had long played skillfully upon credulity and ignorance; he had frittered away his life in contentions with groundlings. It would be a relief, if it were possible, to deal with his peers, the enlightened, the far-seeing, and the fearless, who strove for great ends. So he pondered, while outside the sentinel kept watch like a fate. "Yes," Sylvia was saying slowly, "you can make restitution.
O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb- shows and noise. I could have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it. I Player. I warrant your honor. Hamlet.
And the groundlings had guffawed! Perhaps it was a puzzle he could never solve. And now he first thought of the new piece. This threw him into fresh panic. What awful things, with his high and serious acting, would he have been made to do in that? Patiently, one by one, he went over the scenes in which he had appeared.
Theme rather than treatment was best calculated to "tickle the groundlings." Stratford in Shakespeare's time administered its own affairs in very complete fashion through the medium of a Guild, which was turned into a Municipal Corporation by Edward VI. It boasted bailiff, aldermen, burgesses and chamberlains, and the council met every month in the Guild Hall.
'The author, continued the reviewer, 'whose style is for the most part easy and dignified, with a praiseworthy absence of all inflation or bombast, seems at times to have been smitten by a fatal desire to "split the ears of the groundlings" and produce an impression by showy parades of a not overwhelmingly profound scholarship; and the effect of these contrasts would be grotesque in the extreme, were it not absolutely painful in a work of such high average merit.
Public meetings, God knows, are rife enough, and why will the numskulls not confine their infernal dullness to them? why not be satisfied with splitting the ears of the groundlings there? why will they not consider that convivial conversation should be lively as the sparkle of musketry, brilliant, sharp, and sprightly, and not like the thundering of heavy cannon, or heavier bombs.
He speech on Uganda, so far as its thought and its phraseology were concerned, was on the level of the profound utterances with which Sir Ashmead Bartlett tickles and infuriates the groundlings of provincial audiences.
"Hail to the sun!" says the Prince of Tanais: "Hail to the sun! from whose returning light The cheerful soldier's arms new lustre take To deck the pomp of battle." Playwrights of Rowe's cult loved to hail the sun. Just why the orb of day had to be saluted with such frequency no one seemed able to determine, but the honour was continually bestowed, to the great edification of the groundlings.
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