I am still reading "Don Quixote", and was much struck with the perfect narrative style of the inserted story "The Ill-Advised Curiosity". It is simply charming. And I am with the licentiate who, after censuring the improbabilities, said: "With the manner of the telling I have no fault to find." I should like sometime to write a few stories in that simple style - pure narration, very little dialogue, and what there is arranged conventionally in long speeches. Hardy's "A Group of Noble Dames" must have been composed under some such influence I imagine.
"Bostock's Great Animal Arena" at the Hippodrome de Place Clichy. First night. Vast crowd, very badly controlled. The whole performance consisted of wild-animal tricks. The principal dompteur had some exciting moments in the vast cage with lionesses, a tiger, several bears, a hyena, a leopard, two superb dogs, and other animals. When a crisis arrived the Frenchmen around me were as impressed as children. "Ils ne sont pas commodes", "Il a du sangfroid!", and, when their nerves were getting strained, "Assez! Assez!" in a nervous tone. Some of the crises were apparently somewhat dangerous. During a long bout of opposing wills between the trainer and a tiger, the tiger chewed up a good part of a wooden seat and splintered the gate over which he had to jump. And if, at the end of that bout, the trainer was only acting when he wiped his brow, he was acting very well. At the beginning the crowd was captious and fractious, owing to delays and bad arrangements, but the applause was now tremendous. The performance was really rather out of the way and it is no good me pretending that I watched it unmoved. I did not. And I certainly appreciate more than I have done before the charm of danger in a show, real danger.Bostock himself, remarkably to my mind, was born in Basford in Derbyshire and started his career in small circuses. But he is now celebrated worldwide as "The Animal King". I am told that only a couple of years ago in New York a tiger nearly ripped his arm off. My informant was not able to tell me if it was the same tiger I saw last last evening. Bostock is only a year older than me and I thought I had risen strongly from humble Midland origins. I shall have to review this perception in light of new information.
