of but
slightly reduced placards and with a strange and delightful greasy feel
and redolence of printer's ink, intensely theatrical ink somehow, in
their big black lettering. Charles Matthews must have been then in his
mid-career, and him too, wasted and aged, infinitely "marked," I was to
see again, ever so long after, in America; an impression reminding me,
as I recover it, of how one took his talent so thoroughly for granted
that he seemed somehow to get but half the credit of it: this at least
in all save parts of mere farce and "patter," which were on a footing,
and no very interesting one, of their own. The other effect, that of a
naturalness so easy and immediate, so friendly and intimate, that one's
relation with the artist lost itself in one's relation with the
character, the artist thereby somehow positively suffering while the
character gained, or at least while the spectator did--this comes back
to me quite as a part even of my earlier experience and as attesting on
behalf of the actor a remarkable genius; since there are no more
charming artistic cases than those of the frank result, when it is frank
_enough_, and the dissimulated process, when the dissimulation has been
deep. To drop, or appear to drop, machinery and yet keep, or at least
gain, intensity, the interesting intensity separated by a gulf from a
mere unbought coincidence of aspect or organ, is really to do something.
In spite of which, at the same time, what I perhaps most retain, by the
light of the present, of the sense of that big and rather dusky night of
Drury Lane is not so much the felt degree of anyone's talent as the fact
that personality and artistry, _with_ their intensity, could work their
spell in such a material desert, in conditions intrinsically so
charmless, so bleak and bare. The conditions gave nothing of what we
regard to-day as most indispensable--since our present fine conception
is but to reduce and fill in the material desert, to people and carpet
and curtain it. We may be right, so far as that goes, but our
predecessors were, with their eye on the essence, not wrong; thanks to
which they wear the crown of our now thinking of them--if we do think of
them--as in their way giants and heroes. What their successors were to
become is another question; very much better dressed, beyond all doubt.

XXIV

Good Robert Thompson was followed by _fin_ M. Lerambert--who was surely
good too, in his different way; good at least