The defect turned out to be the one already spoken of-- two stories in one, a
farce and a tragedy.
As a matter of fact it was neither farce nor tragedy.
I told you last night on the road that it was a farce we were engaged in."
Farce notes like those which had so much astounded them the month before.
Congress and the Senate were empty pretences,
farces. Public questions were gravely debated and passed upon according to the old forms, while in reality all that was done was to give the stamp of constitutional procedure to the mandates of the Oligarchy.
But just as in the case of the Mystery and the Morality, the Interlude developed out of the Morality, and the two cannot always be distinguished, some single plays being distinctly described by the authors as 'Moral Interludes.' In the Interludes the realism of the Moralities became still more pronounced, so that the typical Interlude is nothing more than a coarse
farce, with no pretense at religious or ethical meaning.
'Step out,' says one of the men; 'the theatre's close by, and we shall be just in time for the
farce.' I turned about and followed them.
Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the
farce.
As it is, when I started even my post was a
farce. We had to knuckle under the whole of the time, to the civil authorities.
Sheer
farce and coarse burlesque, with plenty of color for the money, still made up the sum of what the public of those days wanted.
I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than "Rollo," "The Wife," "The Stranger," "Barbarossa," "The Miser of Marseilles," and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and
farces which I saw at that time.
Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in
farces --though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.