THEATER-GOING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
"I am sorry to interrupt," said Edith, "but it wants only five minutes of
the time for the rising of the curtain, and Julian ought not to miss the
first scene."
On this notice we at once betook ourselves to the music room, where four
easy chairs had been cozily arranged for our convenience. While the
doctor was adjusting the telephone and electroscope connections for our
use, I expatiated to my companion upon the contrasts between the
conditions of theater-going in the nineteenth and in the twentieth
centuries--contrasts which the happy denizens of the present world can
scarcely, by any effort of imagination, appreciate. "In my time, only the
residents of the larger cities, or visitors to them, were ever able to
enjoy good plays or operas, pleasures which were by necessary consequence
forbidden and unknown to the mass of the people. But even those who as to
locality might enjoy these recreations were obliged, in order to do so,
to undergo and endure such prodigious fuss, crowding, expense, and
general derangement of comfort that for the most part they preferred to
stay at home. As for enjoying the great artists of other countries, one
had to travel to do so or wait for the artists to travel. To-day, I need
not tell you how it is: you stay at home and send your eyes and ears
abroad to see and hear for you. Wherever the electric connection is
carried--and there need be no human habitation however remote from social
centers, be it the mid-air balloon or mid-ocean float of the weather
watchman, or the ice-crusted hut of the polar observer, where it may not
reach--it is possible in slippers and dressing gown for the dweller to
take his choice of the public entertainments given that day in every city
of the earth. And remember, too, although you can not understand it, who
have never seen bad acting or heard bad singing, how this ability of one
troupe to play or sing to the whole earth at once has operated to take
away the occupation of mediocre artists, seeing that everybody, being
able to see and hear the best, will hear them and see them only."
"There goes the bell for the curtain," said the doctor, and in another
moment I had forgotten all else in the scene upon the stage. I need not
sketch the action of a play so familiar as "The Knights of the Golden
Rule." It is enough for this purpose to recall the fact that the costumes
and setting were of the last days of the nineteenth century, little
different from what they had been when I looked last on the world of that
day. There were a few anachronisms and inaccuracies in the setting which
the theatrical administration has since done me the honor to solicit my
assistance in correcting, but the best tribute to the general correctness
of the scheme was its effect to make me from the first moment oblivious
of my actual surroundings. I found myself in presence of a group of
living contemporaries of my former life, men and women dressed as I had
seen them dressed, talking and acting, as till within a few weeks I had
always seen people talk and act; persons, in short, of like passions,
prejudices, and manners to my own, even to minute mannerisms ingeniously
introduced by the playwright, which even more than the larger traits of
resemblance affected my imagination. The only feeling that hindered my
full acceptance of the idea that I was attending a nineteenth-century
show was a puzzled wonder why I should seem to know so much more than the
actors appeared to about the outcome of the social revolution they were
alluding to as in progress.
When the curtain fell on the first scene, and I looked about and saw
Edith, her mother and father, sitting about me in the music room, the
realization of my actual situation came with a shock that earlier in my
twentieth-century career would have set my brain swimming. But I was too
firm on my new feet now for anything of that sort, and for the rest of
the play the constant sense of the tremendous experience which had made
me at once a contemporary of two ages so widely apart, contributed an
indescribable intensity to my enjoyment of the play.
After the curtain fell, we sat talking of the drama, and everything else,
till the globe of the color clock, turning from bottle-green to white,
warned us of midnight, when the ladies left the doctor and myself to our
own devices.