Circus

“ In my boyish days, the cry of ‘This way for the riders!’ bawled from the stentorian vocal organs of the proprietor or ring-master of a travelling circus, never failed to attract all the boys, and no small proportion of the men and women, to the part of the fair from which it proceeded. Fairs have become things of the past within twelve or fifteen miles of the metropolis; but ever and anon a vitenting circus pitches, for a day or two, in a meadow, and the performances prove as attractive as ever. ”

“ A great deal of fuss over a circus, you may be thinking, my little friend, having yourself been so many times to see “The Greatest Show on Earth” but if you had lived in the days of Hazel and Starlight, and never seen a circus in your life, nor a show of any kind—either great or small—then, perhaps, you would have been not a little excited too. ”

“ Everything about a circus is systematized so that the minute the evening performance is over, everybody jumps to his or her appointed task and works with a will, so that where there were tents with flags and banners flying at night, the next morning there is only a deserted sawdust ring. Circuses spring up over night like mushrooms and disappear as quickly as the dew on the grass when the sun comes up.
By midnight the circus train was well under way and Billy and Nannie found themselves in a cage between the zebra and giraffe. ”

“ The dream and the dizziness were still in my head when I found myself, scarce conscious of intermediate steps, seated actually in the circus at last, and took in the first sniff of that intoxicating circus smell that will stay by me while this clay endures. The place was beset by a hum and a glitter and a mist; suspense brooded large o'er the blank, mysterious arena. ”

“ The circus is immense. The outside is in no way remarkable; it is a low circular yellow building without windows, but on entering one feels the liveliest surprise. It is a circus for a people, where ten thousand spectators can be seated and in which a regiment of cavalry might drill. The arena is circular, and so vast that it could hold ten of our equestrian circuses. It is encircled by a wooden barrier about even with a man’s shoulders, provided on the inside with a narrow ledge a little way from the ground, on which the toreros place their feet to jump over when the bull chases them. ”

“ It is clear as day in the circus, for though they had not been able to bring in gas pipes, a gigantic chandelier formed of fifty kerosene lamps takes its place. In those gleams are visible the heads of the beer drinkers, fleshy, thrown back to give room to their chins, the youthful faces of women, and the pretty, wondering visages of children, whose eyes are almost coming out of their heads from curiosity. But all the spectators have the curious, self-satisfied look that is usual in an audience at a circus. ”

“ Here a host of attaches of the circus, and those not definitely attached, wander about like beasts in their cages, or engage in occupations of doubtful character. Here are to be found in great numbers the colored razor-backs, mingled with the white men of that profession. Stake drivers, rope pullers, venders of peanuts and pop, mingle with the motley crowd of sharp-witted gentry who, like vultures following a victorious army, live in the wake of a prosperous circus. ”

“ O, the circus parade! O, the circus parade!
It lays all the politics back in the shade,
And the merchants forget that they've got any trade,
While many remember they've never been paid
As they rushed out to look at the circus parade;
And preachers who used to be terribly staid
Yell just like boys at the circus parade.
Every one's there, both the mistress and maid,
All looking on at the circus parade. ”

“ The guests are arriving very fast, filling already the courtyard, and the immense open space fronting the house which has been turned into a circus. Opposite to this is the ballroom, a leafy bower of flowering shrubs and evergreens; here and there are booths supplying thirsty customers with fiery staventum and English beer; and ere long these people, usually so grave and silent, make the whole place resound with the hubbub of thousands of voices and peals of merry laughter and joyful cries. The bulls have come; the circus is invaded by an immense multitude, all eager to see the sport. ”

“ It was some distance to the circus grounds, but the way seemed all too short for Constable Spriggins, who felt like a man approaching an enemy's battery.
At length they came in sight of the circus grounds. Around the big tent were congregated a crowd of men and boys, and a stream of people was already marching up to the box office to buy tickets, while hitched to trees and posts were carriages and wagons of all descriptions which had been employed to convey intending spectators from the town round about. Nothing draws like a circus in the country, or perhaps we may add in the city also. ”

“ The theatre and the circus, both sources of unlimited amusement to the world, are also objects of the greatest interest to all who have had even a single peep at the stage or pressed their feet even once upon the sawdust precincts of the tented show. ”

“ At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the ground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the other day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world than circus events. It must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind as in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely resembles. ”

“ Let us not forget to mention a brief visit to those strange fanatics, the whirling dervishes, in witnessing whose singular movements one is at a loss whether to sigh or to laugh. To the young the performance suggests that of the circus, and until wearied of the monotony of it, is perhaps as amusing; but to this more thoughtful observer it is melancholy to see men so debase themselves. ”

“ The great unchangeable features of a show, the gymnastic, acrobatic and equestrian work, are the same now that it was a half century ago. Still with all its want of novelty it is attractive, as are all shows, and grown people have been known to share the enthusiasm of the little ones in playing circus after witnessing a performance and while the sawdust fever was still on them. ”

“ I saw a group of men and women pressing against each other in the middle of the oblong arena of the circus, under the gaze of thousands of eyes, while from all the steps of the immense amphitheater went up the terrible cry, Ad leones! ”

“ The jocularities of the clowns, the intricate evolutions of the trained animals, the golden glitter of the gorgeous cavalcades—all these are but the casual accompaniments of the essential privilege of the circus to present to us a succession of men and women, with their bodies in perfect condition, to exhibit to us that purely physical beauty which we are ever in danger of overlooking or even forgetting. ”

“ There has been nothing new in the genuine features of the circus for the past fifty years. There are a few deceptive tricks that have been seen only of late years but they are mere ephemeral illusions, easy of explanation, and time will take them out of the circus ring as it took the lion-taming act. I can remember the time when the cage of lions was dragged into the middle of the arena and amid the greatest excitement the alleged lion-tamer went in among the animals, beat them about, lay down upon the back of one and put his head between the wide-open jaws of another. ”

“ He says he wants me to learn the circus business from the ground up, from the currying of the hyenas with a currycomb and brush, to going up into the roof of the tent on the trapeze and falling into the net, while the audience faints with excitement. ”

“ This vast and superb circus is surrounded by small dirty houses, while yet smaller and dirtier fill up the area, in such a manner that the whole produces an unequal and confused effect, in which regret and indignation stifle pleasure and surprise. ”

“ How far has present-day American advertising acknowledged its immense debt to the traveling show? What Matthew Arnold or James Bryce coming to our shores to examine American character and lacking, possibly, the wisdom of the serpent acquired the Wisdom of the circus? And our psychologists busied with delicate tests on the nerve-endings of frogs; were they dumb-bells so long? They were. They went not to the circus, the sluggards; they examined not its ways.
Yet it would be true to say that the circus is the one most typical American institution. ”

“ At the same time the circus has been something much more than a spectacle; frequently it has been a coöperative enterprise. Mr. Cooper gives some idea of the innumerable occasions on which the American small boy, judiciously and fairly rewarded with a free ticket, has pulled the circus out of some insuperable physical difficulty. The circus was the original discoverer of the most important element in American psychology, the love of bigness and display, the admiration for achievement in size. ”

“ There is something, some sort of electricity that runs from a boy to a circus, and all the teachers in the world cannot break the connection. A circus is the boys' heaven.
You may talk to him about the beautiful gates ajar, and the angel band in heaven that plays around the great white throne, and he can't understand it, but the least hint about the circus tent, with the flap pulled to one side to get in, and the band wagon, and the girls jumping through hoops, and the clown, and he is onto your racket at a jump. ”

“ The consciousness of his power makes him gentle.
His abnegation becomes the more startlingly virtuous when it is considered that he resists the temptation to use that fascinating device, paradox. For the circus is paradox itself—this reactionary and futuristic exhibition, full of Roman chariots and motor cycles, of high romance and grotesque realism, this demonstration of democracy and aristocracy, equality and subordination, worldliness and religion. ”

“ The tricks of the circus, now so familiar, that in England, at least, no one cares to see them, were at that time new, and the sight of a man attitudinising on the back of a horse at full gallop excited the greatest wonder. ”

“ His mental conception of the exhibition, aided by the well known cries of the multitude, is so vivid, that when a burst of applause allows his attendant just to hint at the event that drew it from the spectators, the unfortunate man’s face gleams with pleasure, and he echoes the last clappings of the circus. ”

“ The work of the leading equestrienne is one of the most laborious in the whole range of the circus profession. It requires physical courage of the highest order, combined with great power of endurance and a capacity for adopting oneself to a constant change of scene and surrounding. People who witness only the 545brilliant performances in the ring in an atmosphere laden with light and music, little dream of the wearisome toil and drudgery which precede them. ”

“ If one can go far enough back to remember the awe and mystery surrounding a circus, and then imagine a circus coming bodily to lodge in one's own dwelling, to eat with the knives and forks at one's table—a circus which could swallow fire and swords, and things of that sort, just eating off plates in the ordinary manner, with Sissy waiting on the table behind its chairs—if one can get back to this happy time, it will be possible to comprehend some of the rapture the twins, Gess and Tell, experienced while Frosty La Rue's show abode at the Wagon-Tire House. ”

“ Circus folks aren't cut out for parsons' homes, and I was born in the circus. I love it—I love it!” She felt her strength going, and cried out wildly: “I want Bingo! I want to go round and round the ring! I want the lights and the music and the hoops! ”

“ And run I shall, to my dying day, whenever a bull begins to explain with a club.
Why, years after my tramping days, when I was a student in the University of California, one night I went to the circus. After the show and the concert I lingered on to watch the working of the transportation machinery of a great circus. The circus was leaving that night. By a bonfire I came upon a bunch of small boys. There were about twenty of them, and as they talked with one another I learned that they were going to run away with the circus. ”

“ The circus is always called the ‘show;’ I have never heard it termed the ‘booth,’ which is the word which Dickens puts into the mouth of Cissy Jupe, the little daughter of the clown of Sleary’s circus, in Hard Times. ”

“ I have seen a diabolo player who was beautiful to follow, and a juggler who placed two billiard cues end to end on his forehead, threw a ball and caught it at the top of the cues, then dislodged the ball and put it into play with three others. This extraordinary mixture of good and dull things, this lack of character, makes the circus easy to like and useless to think about. ”

“ The Circus Dream “I want to tell you the story this evening,” said daddy, “of a little boy named Jay Rial.
“Jay Rial was as nice a little boy as any one could ever hope to see. Every one liked him and he liked people, too. But the thing he loved above everything else in the world was the circus.
“He loved the sound of the train whistle which brought the circus to town, and he loved the old circus which used to travel by the road and not come by the train at all. He loved the circus band, the clowns, the animals. ”

“ And of course every one who has ever been to a circus will recall how the ladies and gentlemen of the company come into the ring on horseback, and ride round and round with distinguished courtesy towards each other and towards the audience, and then ride out again. ”