This extraordinary mixture of good and dull things, this lack of character, makes the circus easy to like and useless to think about. But there are trapeze workers whose technique is a joy to see and who exploit all the possible turns, leaps, somersaults in air, so that one is pleased and dazzled. I do not wonder that painters in every age have found them lovely subject. But a lady balanced on one leg of trapeze bar, smoking a cigarette, fanning herself, not holding on to anything-means exactly nothing to me unless it is accomplished with some other quality than nerve. I am sure she will never fall and do not care to be present when she does.
Clowns are different.
Even those poor nameless ones who dash in between major acts and with noise and toy balloons divert little children, have some quality. They partake of our tradition about masks, they can't help having background. Marceline helping the attendants with Powers' Elephants at the Hippodrome, so busy, so in the way, so unconscious of hindering, always created a little world around himself. A footnote to a footnote is preposterous. Perhaps the very excess of its obscurity will give it prominence and render faint justice to the old NewYork Hippodrome.