photography as so applied, and documentary in the highest degree on the
personalities, as we nowadays say, of the old American stage,
stupefaction grew sharp in me and scepticism triumphed, so vulgar, so
barbarous, seemed the array of types, so extraordinarily provincial the
note of every figure, so less than scant the claim of such
physiognomies and such reputations. Rather dismal, everywhere, I admit,
the histrionic image with the artificial lights turned off--the fatigued
and disconnected face reduced to its mere self and resembling some
closed and darkened inn with the sign still swung but the place blighted
for want of custom. That consideration weighs; but what a "gang," all
the same, when thus left to their own devices, the performers, men and
women alike, of that world of queer appreciations! I ought perhaps to
bear on them lightly in view of what in especial comes back to me; the
sense of the sacred thrill with which I began to watch the green
curtain, the particular one that was to rise to The Comedy of Errors on
the occasion that must have been, for what I recall of its almost
unbearable intensity, the very first of my ever sitting at a play. I
should have been indebted for the momentous evening in that case to Mr.
William Burton, whose small theatre in Chambers Street, to the rear of
Stewart's big shop and hard by the Park, as the Park was at that time
understood, offered me then my prime initiation. Let me not complain of
my having owed the adventure to a still greater William as well, nor
think again without the right intensity, the scarce tolerable throb, of
the way the torment of the curtain was mixed, half so dark a defiance
and half so rich a promise. One's eyes bored into it in vain, and yet
one knew it _would_ rise at the named hour, the only question being if
one could exist till then. The play had been read to us during the day;
a celebrated English actor, whose name I inconsistently forget, had
arrived to match Mr. Burton as the other of the Dromios; and the
agreeable Mrs. Holman, who had to my relentless vision too retreating a
chin, was so good as to represent Adriana. I regarded Mrs. Holman as a
friend, though in no warmer light than that in which I regarded Miss
Mary Taylor--save indeed that Mrs. Holman had the pull, on one's
affections, of "coming out" to sing in white satin and quite
irrelevantly between the acts; an advantage she shared with the younger
and fairer and more dashing, the danci