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The Harlequinade An Excursion by Calthrop, Dion Clayton, 1878-1937, Granville-Barker, Harley, 1877-1946
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A word from our supporters: File extension M3U | country song. There! they've begun ... because I've been so long. That's her song. She sings as she goes through the rooms a-dusting them. And when she sings, little wild flowers grow up through the chinks of the boards. UNCLE EDWARD. I suppose they are ready. melted to this last touch. He is wreathed in smiles. She's a wonderful child. Knows the whole thing backwards. Thinks of new bits for herself! I call to mind her mother saying ... ALICE. Ready when we've counted twenty. UNCLE EDWARD. Right. counting as an accompaniment to the little song. * * * * *And so we have got to the Eighteenth Century. And we're to have a comedy of manners, and a nice study of clothes. All rather shapely; for it contains a real Beau, and the only valet who was ever a hero, and the only hero who ever had Mercury to valet him. There is a good deal of dressing up in this scene, and a neat ploy of dressing down, and a man's soul comes into being all over an affair of a looking-glass. Which makes a pretty piece of work. Alice knows Hogarth through the--shall we say?--nicer prints, and Austin Dobson through the daintiest of Ballads. This scene is a sort of mixture to her of early reading, and visits with her Uncle to the National Gallery, and old bits of China, and dumpy little leather-bound volumes of "The Spectator", the real "Spectator", which she can just remember on the fourth shelf from the top near the window. You may add, for your own personal satisfaction, when you are sitting and looking on, all that tense excitement the very words "Eighteenth Century" awaken in the properly balanced mind. Wigs and coaches and polite highwaymen, and lonely gibbets on still more lonely moors, and the Bath road with its chains and posts, all come into the background. Pedlars and cries of Pottles of Cherries, Puppet Showmen, and Clowns on stilts and French watergilders, and the sound of swords early in the morning in Leicester Fields: the touch of them all should be there. And also St. James's Street crammed with sedan chairs, and black pages with parrots, and the rattle of dice at White's or Almack's, and the hurrying feet of the Duke of Queensberry's running footmen. Such romantic dreams should come to you. Sliding panels and gentlemen driving heiresses to Gretna Green, and secret meeting places, and Fleet marriages and the scent of lavender, musk, and bergamot! But the song is nearly over and the curtains are drawn back. |