[Spoken in the character of Pierrot]
The sun is up, yet ere a body stirs,
A word with you, sweet ladies and dear sirs,
(Although on no account let any say
That Pierrot finished Mr. Dowson's play).
One night not long ago, at Baden Baden,—
The birthday of the Duke,—his pleasure garden
Was lighted gaily with feu d'artifice,
With candles, rockets, and a center-piece
Above the conversation house, on high,
Outlined in living fire against the sky,
A glittering Pierrot, radiant, white,
Whose heart beat fast, who danced with sheer delight,
Whose eyes were blue, whose lips were rosy red,
Whose pompons too were fire, while on his head
He wore a little cap, and I am told
That rockets covered him with showers of gold.
"Take our applause, you well deserve to win it,"
They cried: "Bravo! the Pierrot of the minute!"
What with applause and gold, one must confess
That Pierrot had "arrived," achieved success,
When, as it happened, presently, alas!
A terrible disaster came to pass.
His nose grew dim, the people gave a shout,
His red lips paled, both his blue eyes went out.
There rose a sullen sound of discontent,
The golden shower of rockets was all spent;
He left off dancing with a sudden jerk,
For he was nothing but a firework.
The garden darkened and the people in it
Cried, "He is dead,—the Pierrot of the minute!"
With every artist it is even so;
The artist, after all, is a Pierrot—
A Pierrot of the minute, naif, clever,
But Art is back of him, She lives for ever!
Then pardon my Moon Maid and me, because
We craved the golden shower of your applause!
Pray shrive us both for having tried to win it,
And cry, "Bravo! The Pierrot of the minute!"
THE MAKER OF DREAMS[28]
A FANTASY IN ONE ACT
By
OLIPHANT DOWN
The Maker of Dreams by the late Oliphant Down was first given at the Royalty Theatre in Glasgow, November 20, 1911. The design for the setting here reproduced was used when the play was acted in March, 1915, at The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. The picture does not show how touches of red here and there in the scene, and the brilliant blue sky, visible through the quaint windows, enhanced the character of the black and white of the walls and of the flower pots. The back wall of the set was mounted on casters and, while Pierrette slept, moved silently off stage, to disclose to the audience a formal garden at the back, where a miniature Pierrot and a tiny Pierrette did a joyous little dance, thus suggesting to the spectators Pierrette's happy dream.
Pierrot, the hero of this and of the preceding play, has had an interesting stage history. To understand him fully we have to go back to the comedy of masks that had fully developed in Italy by the time of the Renascence. This comedy was a special kind of play, the scenario of which only was written, the dialogue being improvised by the individual players. Each player wore a costume and a mask that never changed, and these fixed his identity. Most of the parts had a strong local flavor, the pedant, for example, hailing from Bologna, the overly shrewd merchant, from Venice. Many of the characters have become fixed types and reappear under their old names in various forms of modern drama. Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, Punch and Judy, and Pierrot are among those who live on in modern drama. There is an enchanting play by Granville Barker and Dion Clayton Calthrop called The Harlequinade, that describes in a popular way the devious and uncertain paths traveled by these stock characters down the ages.
Pierrot's ancestry is not so clearly Italian as the others. Pedrolino, a mischievous, intriguing buffoon, Pagliaccio, a madcap who wore a painted hat of white wool and a garment of white linen, whose face was covered with flour, and who wore a white mask, have both been cited as types that may have contributed to the figure of Pierrot, whose name makes its first appearance in MoliÈre's play, Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre. Not that this dull servant of MoliÈre's is in any sense the counterpart of the Pierrot of our day who is by turns languishing or vivacious, impish or poetic, but never doltish. From the seventeenth century, Pierrot, his costume borrowed from the Neapolitan mask, Pulcinella, became more and more prominent on both the Italian and the French stage. It was a certain French pantomime actor by the name of Deburau who died a few years before the middle of the nineteenth century, who gave Pierrot the prominence that he enjoys to-day and who dressed the character in the guise that he most often assumes on the modern stage. "The short woolen tunic, with its great buttons and its narrow sleeves, that overhung the hands, soon became an ample calico blouse with wide long sleeves like those of the Italian Pagliaccio. He suppressed the collar, which cast an upward shadow from the footlights on to his face, and interfered with the play of his countenance, and instead of the white skull-cap of his predecessor, he emphasized the pallor of his face by framing it in a cap of black velvet."[29] The Pierrot of our fancy[30] comes to us also through the pictures of Watteau and Pater and the designs of Aubrey Beardsley.
A one-act farce, The Quod Wrangle, is the only other published play of Oliphant Down's. Its plot, as outlined in The London Times of March 4, 1914, reminds one strongly of O. Henry's The Cop and the Anthem.
The Maker of Dreams at The Neighborhood Playhouse, designed by Aline Bernstein.
