ic than my first, and
that my first "Cassy," that of the great and blood-curdling Mrs. Bellamy
of the lecture-room, touched depths which made the lady at the National
prosaic and placid (I could already be "down" on a placid Cassy;) just
as on the other hand the rocking of the ice-floes of the Ohio, with the
desperate Eliza, infant in arms, balancing for a leap from one to the
other, had here less of the audible creak of carpentry, emulated a
trifle more, to my perception, the real water of Mr. Crummles's pump.
They can't, even at that, have emulated it much, and one almost envies
(quite making up one's mind not to denounce) the simple faith of an age
beguiled by arts so rude.

However, the point exactly was that we attended this spectacle just in
order _not_ to be beguiled, just in order to enjoy with ironic
detachment and, at the very most, to be amused ourselves at our
sensibility should it prove to have been trapped and caught. To have
become thus aware of our collective attitude constituted for one small
spectator at least a great initiation; he got his first glimpse of that
possibility of a "free play of mind" over a subject which was to throw
him with force at a later stage of culture, when subjects had
considerably multiplied, into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold. So he
is himself at least interested in seeing the matter--as a progress in
which the first step was taken, before that crude scenic appeal, by his
wondering, among his companions, where the absurd, the absurd for
_them_, ended and the fun, the real fun, which was the gravity, the
tragedy, the drollery, the beauty, the thing itself, briefly, might be
legitimately and tastefully held to begin. Uncanny though the remark
perhaps, I am not sure I wasn't thus more interested in the pulse of our
party, under my tiny recording thumb, than in the beat of the drama and
the shock of its opposed forces--vivid and touching as the contrast was
then found for instance between the tragi-comical Topsy, the slave-girl
clad in a pinafore of sackcloth and destined to become for Anglo-Saxon
millions the type of the absolute in the artless, and her little
mistress the blonde Eva, a figure rather in the Kenwigs tradition of
pantalettes and pigtails, whom I recall as perching quite suicidally,
with her elbows out and a preliminary shriek, on that bulwark of the
Mississippi steamboat which was to facilitate her all but fatal
immersion in the flood. Why should I have duly