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 air 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 Colly 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 honor over the
chimney-piece.
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--Phantastic 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 the applause that 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 among 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 parlor, 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 gray-haired, were there, and among 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 "Burly 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 pal piti_." 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 humor! 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 gas-light 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 every where growing more and more 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
heard, accompanied with unctuous sobs; and now and then, in the midst of
balderdash, gleams out a gorgeous sentence, that Jeremy Taylor might
have envied: driveling 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 gas-light, and all was dark as pitch--howls and laughter,
as of the damned, ringing through the Pandemonium. Out from the black
atmosphere stept the boy-poet; and the still stars rushed on his sight,
as they looked over the grimy roof-tops.