And There Is A Heavy Father With Grey Hair, Who
Sits Down On The Regular Conventional Stage-Bank, And Blesses His
Daughter In The Regular Conventional Way, Who Is Tremendous.
No
one would suppose it possible that anything short of a real man
could be so tedious.
It is the triumph of art.
In the ballet, an Enchanter runs away with the Bride, in the very
hour of her nuptials, He brings her to his cave, and tries to
soothe her. They sit down on a sofa (the regular sofa! in the
regular place, O. P. Second Entrance!) and a procession of
musicians enters; one creature playing a drum, and knocking himself
off his legs at every blow. These failing to delight her, dancers
appear. Four first; then two; THE two; the flesh-coloured two.
The way in which they dance; the height to which they spring; the
impossible and inhuman extent to which they pirouette; the
revelation of their preposterous legs; the coming down with a
pause, on the very tips of their toes, when the music requires it;
the gentleman's retiring up, when it is the lady's turn; and the
lady's retiring up, when it is the gentleman's turn; the final
passion of a pas-de-deux; and the going off with a bound!--I shall
never see a real ballet, with a composed countenance again.
I went, another night, to see these Puppets act a play called 'St.
Helena, or the Death of Napoleon.' It began by the disclosure of
Napoleon, with an immense head, seated on a sofa in his chamber at
St. Helena; to whom his valet entered with this obscure
announcement:
'Sir Yew ud se on Low?' (the ow, as in cow).
Sir Hudson (that you could have seen his regimentals!) was a
perfect mammoth of a man, to Napoleon; hideously ugly, with a
monstrously disproportionate face, and a great clump for the lower-
jaw, to express his tyrannical and obdurate nature. He began his
system of persecution, by calling his prisoner 'General
Buonaparte;' to which the latter replied, with the deepest tragedy,
'Sir Yew ud se on Low, call me not thus. Repeat that phrase and
leave me! I am Napoleon, Emperor of France!' Sir Yew ud se on,
nothing daunted, proceeded to entertain him with an ordinance of
the British Government, regulating the state he should preserve,
and the furniture of his rooms: and limiting his attendants to
four or five persons. 'Four or five for ME!' said Napoleon. 'Me!
One hundred thousand men were lately at my sole command; and this
English officer talks of four or five for ME!' Throughout the
piece, Napoleon (who talked very like the real Napoleon, and was,
for ever, having small soliloquies by himself) was very bitter on
'these English officers,' and 'these English soldiers;' to the
great satisfaction of the audience, who were perfectly delighted to
have Low bullied; and who, whenever Low said 'General Buonaparte'
(which he always did: always receiving the same correction), quite
execrated him. It would be hard to say why; for Italians have
little cause to sympathise with Napoleon, Heaven knows.
There was no plot at all, except that a French officer, disguised
as an Englishman, came to propound a plan of escape; and being
discovered, but not before Napoleon had magnanimously refused to
steal his freedom, was immediately ordered off by Low to be hanged.
In two very long speeches, which Low made memorable, by winding up
with 'Yas!'--to show that he was English--which brought down
thunders of applause. Napoleon was so affected by this
catastrophe, that he fainted away on the spot, and was carried out
by two other puppets. Judging from what followed, it would appear
that he never recovered the shock; for the next act showed him, in
a clean shirt, in his bed (curtains crimson and white), where a
lady, prematurely dressed in mourning, brought two little children,
who kneeled down by the bedside, while he made a decent end; the
last word on his lips being 'Vatterlo.'
It was unspeakably ludicrous. Buonaparte's boots were so
wonderfully beyond control, and did such marvellous things of their
own accord: doubling themselves up, and getting under tables, and
dangling in the air, and sometimes skating away with him, out of
all human knowledge, when he was in full speech--mischances which
were not rendered the less absurd, by a settled melancholy depicted
in his face. To put an end to one conference with Low, he had to
go to a table, and read a book: when it was the finest spectacle I
ever beheld, to see his body bending over the volume, like a boot-
jack, and his sentimental eyes glaring obstinately into the pit.
He was prodigiously good, in bed, with an immense collar to his
shirt, and his little hands outside the coverlet. So was Dr.
Antommarchi, represented by a puppet with long lank hair, like
Mawworm's, who, in consequence of some derangement of his wires,
hovered about the couch like a vulture, and gave medical opinions
in the air. He was almost as good as Low, though the latter was
great at all times--a decided brute and villain, beyond all
possibility of mistake. Low was especially fine at the last, when,
hearing the doctor and the valet say, 'The Emperor is dead!' he
pulled out his watch, and wound up the piece (not the watch) by
exclaiming, with characteristic brutality, 'Ha! ha! Eleven minutes
to six! The General dead! and the spy hanged!' This brought the
curtain down, triumphantly.
There is not in Italy, they say (and I believe them), a lovelier
residence than the Palazzo Peschiere, or Palace of the Fishponds,
whither we removed as soon as our three months' tenancy of the Pink
Jail at Albaro had ceased and determined.
It stands on a height within the walls of Genoa, but aloof from the
town: surrounded by beautiful gardens of its own, adorned with
statues, vases, fountains, marble basins, terraces, walks of
orange-trees and lemon-trees, groves of roses and camellias.
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