We will add that we believe these people have a right to be amused. A
great deal that we consider to be unreasonable, is written and talked
about not licensing these places of entertainment. We have already
intimated that we believe a love of dramatic representations to be an
inherent principle in human nature. In most conditions of human life of
which we have any knowledge, from the Greeks to the Bosjesmen, some form
of dramatic representation has always obtained.[1] We have a vast
respect for county magistrates, and for the lord chamberlain; but we
render greater deference to such extensive and immutable experience, and
think it will outlive the whole existing court and commission. We would
assuredly not bear harder on the fourpenny theatre, than on the four
shilling theatre, or the four guinea theatre; but we would decidedly
interpose to turn to some wholesome account the means of instruction
which it has at command, and we would make that office of Dramatic
Licenser, which, like many other offices, has become a mere piece of
Court favour and dandy conventionality, a real, responsible, educational
trust. We would have it exercise a sound supervision over the lower
drama, instead of stopping the career of a real work of art, as it did
in the case of Mr. Chorley’s play at the Surrey Theatre, but a few weeks
since, for a sickly point of form.
Footnote 1:
In the remote interior of Africa, and among the North American
Indians, this truth is exemplified in an equally striking manner. Who
that saw the four grim, stunted, abject Bush-people at the Egyptian
Hall—with two natural actors among them out of that number, one a male
and the other a female—can forget how something human and imaginative
gradually broke out in the little ugly man, when he was roused from
crouching over the charcoal fire, into giving a dramatic
representation of the tracking of a beast, the shooting of it with
poisoned arrows, and the creature’s death?
To return to MR. WHELKS. The audience, being able to see and hear, were
very attentive. They were so closely packed, that they took a little
time in settling down after any pause; but otherwise the general
disposition was to lose nothing, and to check (in no choice language)
any disturber of the business of the scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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