If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield,
I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in
England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in
it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than
the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to
climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy
valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can
never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering
chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious,
but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and
estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its
part in heightening the dramatic effect.
I
The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not
be able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would
so obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these
aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller,
or less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the
capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I
thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I
could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise
made for it by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my
strength to go and see that colored opera which we had lately sent,
after its signal success with us, to an even greater prosperity in
England. _In Dahomey_ is a musical drama not pitched in the highest key,
but it is a genuine product of our national life, and to witness its
performance by the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving
it with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial
prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many
Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it could
not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly felt that no
one there could delight so intelligently as the sole American, in the
familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky types,
which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New York
suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs
in music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals
have evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades
of color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against
an air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say
the poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them.
At a fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity:
a young man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable
manager, was, I hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.