The Room! And the smoke-reek, and the gas glare of it! The whitewash of
the walls, and the prints thereon of the actors in their mime-robes, and
stage postures,--actors as far back as their own lost Augustan era, when
the stage was a real living influence on the manners and the age! There
was Betterton, in wig and gown,--as Cato, moralizing on the soul's
eternity, and halting between Plato and the dagger. There was Woodward
as "The Fine Gentleman," with the inimitable rake-hell in which the
heroes of Wycherly and Congreve and Farquhar live again. There was
jovial Quin as Falstaff, with round buckler and "fair round belly."
There was Colley Cibber in brocade, taking snuff as with "his Lord," the
thumb and forefinger raised in air, and looking at you for applause.
There was Macklin as Shylock, with knife in hand: and Kemble in the
solemn weeds of the Dane; and Kean in the place of honour over the
chimneypiece.
When we are suddenly taken from practical life, with its real workday
men, and presented to the portraits of those sole heroes of a world
Fantastic and Phantasmal, in the garments wherein they did "strut and
fret their hour upon the stage," verily there is something in the sight
that moves an inner sense within ourselves,--for all of us have an inner
sense of some existence, apart from the one that wears away our days: an
existence that, afar from St. James's and St. Giles's, the Law Courts and
Exchange, goes its way in terror or mirth, in smiles or in tears, through
a vague magic-land of the poets. There, see those actors--they are the
men who lived it--to whom our world was the false one, to whom the
Imaginary was the Actual! And did Shakspeare himself, in his life, ever
hearken to such applause as thundered round the personators of his airy
images? Vague children of the most transient of the arts, fleet shadows
on running waters, though thrown down from the steadfast stars, were ye
not happier than we who live in the Real? How strange you must feel in
the great circuit that ye now take through eternity! No prompt-books,
no lamps, no acting Congreve and Shakspeare there! For what parts in the
skies have your studies on the earth fitted you? Your ultimate destinies
are very puzzling. Hail to your effigies, and pass we on!
There, too, on the whitewashed walls, were admitted the portraits of
ruder rivals in the arena of fame,--yet they, too, had known an applause
warmer than his age gave to Shakspeare; the Champions of the Ring,--Cribb
and Molyneux and Dutch Sam. Interspersed with these was an old print of
Newmarket in the early part of the last century, and sundry engravings
from Hogarth. But poets, oh, they were there too! poets who might be
supposed to have been sufficiently good fellows to be at home with such
companions,--Shakspeare, of course, with his placid forehead; Ben Jonson,
with his heavy scowl; Burns and Byron cheek by jowl. But the strangest
of all these heterogeneous specimens of graphic art was a full-length
print of William Pitt!---William Pitt, the austere and imperious. What
the deuce did he do there amongst prize-fighters and actors and poets?
It seemed an insult to his grand memory. Nevertheless there he was, very
erect, and with a look of ineffable disgust in his upturned nostrils.
The portraits on the sordid walls were very like the crambo in the minds
of ordinary men,--very like the motley pictures of the FAMOUS hung up in
your parlour, O my Public! Actors and prize-fighters, poets and
statesmen, all without congruity and fitness, all whom you have been to
see or to hear for a moment, and whose names have stared out in your
newspapers, O my public!
And the company? Indescribable! Comedians, from small theatres, out of
employ; pale, haggard-looking boys, probably the sons of worthy traders,
trying their best to break their fathers' hearts; here and there the
marked features of a Jew. Now and then you might see the curious puzzled
face of some greenhorn about town, or perhaps a Cantab; and men of grave
age, and grayhaired, were there, and amongst them a wondrous proportion
of carbuncled faces and bottle-noses. And when John Burley entered,
there was a shout that made William Pitt shake in his frame. Such
stamping and hallooing, and such hurrahs for "Burley John." And the
gentleman who had filled the great high leathern chair in his absence
gave it up to John Burley; and Leonard, with his grave, observant eye,
and lip half sad and half scornful, placed himself by the side of his
introducer. There was a nameless, expectant stir through the assembly,
as there is in the pit of the opera when some great singer advances to
the lamps, and begins, "Di tanti palpiti." Time flies. Look at the
Dutch clock over the door. Half-an-hour. John Burley begins to warm. A
yet quicker light begins to break from his Eye; his voice has a mellow
luscious roll in it.
"He will be grand to-night," whispered a thin man, who looked like a
tailor, seated on the other side of Leonard. Time flies,--an hour. Look
again at the Dutch clock. John Burley is grand, he is in his zenith, at
his culminating point. What magnificent drollery! what luxuriant humour!
How the Rabelais shakes in his easy-chair! Under the rush and the roar
of this fun (what word else shall describe it?) the man's intellect is as
clear as gold sand under a river. Such wit and such truth, and, at
times, such a flood of quick eloquence! All now are listeners,--silent,
save in applause.
And Leonard listened too. Not, as he would some nights ago, in innocent
unquestioning delight. No; his mind has passed through great sorrow,
great passion, and it comes out unsettled, inquiring, eager, brooding
over joy itself as over a problem. And the drink circulates, and faces
change; and there are gabbling and babbling; and Burley's head sinks in
his bosom, and he is silent. And up starts a wild, dissolute,
bacchanalian glee for seven voices. And the smoke-reek grows denser and
thicker, and the gaslight looks dizzy through the haze. And John
Burley's eyes reel.
Look again at the Dutch clock. Two hours have gone. John Burley has
broken out again from his silence, his voice thick and husky, and his
laugh cracked; and he talks, O ye gods! such rubbish and ribaldry; and
the listeners roar aloud, and think it finer than before. And Leonard,
who had hitherto been measuring himself in his mind against the giant,
and saying inly, "He soars out of my reach," finds the giant shrink
smaller and smaller, and saith to himself, "He is but of man's common
standard after all!"
Look again at the Dutch clock. Three hours have passed. Is John Burley
now of man's common standard? Man himself seems to have vanished from
the scene,--his soul stolen from him, his form gone away with the fumes
of the smoke, and the nauseous steam from that fiery bowl. And Leonard
looked round, and saw but the swine of Circe,--some on the floor, some
staggering against the walls, some hugging each other on the tables, some
fighting, some bawling, some weeping. The divine spark had fled from the
human face; the Beast is everywhere growing more and snore out of the
thing that had been Man. And John Burley, still unconquered, but clean
lost to his senses, fancies himself a preacher, and drawls forth the most
lugubrious sermon upon the brevity of life that mortal ever beard,
accompanied with unctuous sobs; and now and then in the midst of
balderdash gleams out a gorgeous sentence, that Jeremy Taylor might have
envied, drivelling away again into a cadence below the rhetoric of a
Muggletonian. And the waiters choked up the doorway, listening and
laughing, and prepared to call cabs and coaches; and suddenly some one
turned off the gaslight, and all was dark as pitch,--howls and laughter,
as of the damned, ringing through the Pandemonium. Out from the black
atmosphere stepped the boy-poet; and the still stars rushed on his sight,
as they looked over the grimy roof-tops.