Why are we so young?

But it is in the music-hall, as I have said, that I am most impressed with the youthfulness of man.  How delighted we are when the long man in the little boy’s hat, having asked his short brother a riddle, and before he can find time to answer it, hits him over the stomach with an umbrella!  How we clap our hands and shout with glee!  It isn’t really his stomach: it is a bolster tied round his waist—we know that; but seeing the long man whack at that bolster with an umbrella gives us almost as much joy as if the bolster were not there.

I laugh at the knockabout brothers, I confess, so long as they are on the stage; but they do not convince me.  Reflecting on the performance afterwards, my dramatic sense revolts against the “plot.”  I cannot accept the theory of their being brothers.  The difference in size alone is a strain upon my imagination.  It is not probable that of two children of the same parents one should measure six foot six, and the other five foot four.  Even allowing for a freak of nature, and accepting the fact that they might be brothers, I do not believe they would remain so inseparable.  The short brother would have succeeded before now in losing the long brother.  Those continual bangings over the head and stomach would have weakened whatever affection the short brother might originally have felt towards his long relation.  At least, he would insist upon the umbrella being left at home.

“I will go for a walk with you,” he might say, “I will stand stock still with you in Trafalgar Square in the midst of the traffic while you ask me silly riddles, but not if you persist in bringing with you that absurd umbrella.  You are too handy with it.  Put it back in the rack before we start, or go out by yourself.”

Besides, my sense of justice is outraged.  Why should the short brother be banged and thumped without reason?  The Greek dramatist would have explained to us that the shorter brother had committed a crime against the gods.  Aristophanes would have made the longer brother the instrument of the Furies.  The riddles he asked would have had bearing upon the shorter brother’s sin.  In this way the spectator would have enjoyed amusement combined with the satisfactory sense that Nemesis is ever present in human affairs.  I present the idea, for what it may be worth, to the concoctors of knockabout turns.