acres. Dickens's audience that night was
dull, and he became so, too. I was disappointed. His characters were
not lifelike, and his acting was not good, and got worse as he went
on. It was the inevitable law of reaction. His audience bored him, and
he began to bore me, amongst the rest. He was not "in touch" with us,
that is all; and his eyes wandered as hopelessly in search of some
sympathetic eye to catch them, as the gladiators of old, for mercy in
the circus. Then suddenly, at one point of his reading, he had to
introduce the passing character of a nameless individual in a London
crowd, a choleric old gentleman who has only one short sentence to
fire off. This he gave so spontaneously, so inimitably, that the
puppet became an absolute reality in a second. I saw him, crowd,
street, man, temper, and all. For I am, I may say, what is called a
very good audience. I like what I like, and I hate what I hate; and on
one occasion growled at the theater so audibly at what I thought some
very bad acting that I began to hear ominous cries of "Turn him out!"
It was the first night of one of my own plays, Dickens's electric
flash bowled me over so completely and instantly that I broke into a
peal of laughter, and as we sometimes do when hard hit, kept on
laughing internally, which is half tears, and half hiccough, for some
time afterwards. Upon my word, I am laughing now, as I recall it. It
was so funny. The audience of course glared at me with the well-known
look of rebuke. "How _dare_ you express your feelings out loud, and
disturb us!"

But Dickens's eye--I wasn't much more than a boy, and he didn't know
me from Adam--went at once straight for mine. "Here's somebody who
likes me, anyhow," it said. For the next few minutes he read at me, if
ever man did. The sympathetic unit is everything to us. And on my
word the result was that he so warmed to his work that he got the
whole audience in his hand, and dispensed with me. Only once
again--oh, how like him it was!--he fixed me with his eye just towards
the end of the reading, and made a short but perceptible pause. I
wondered what was coming--and soon knew. The choleric old party in the
street had to appear for one passing instant more, and fire off one
more passing sentence. Which he did--with the same results. Good
heavens! what an actor Dickens was.

When that reading ended--with the success which it deserved--never did
that most expressive of all human features, the eye, th