me is that--but it is really _sui generis_ and ineffable--when, having
got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned
playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell--of gas, glue, heaven
knows what glories of yester-year--which, ever since one's babyhood, has
come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money
to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can
never transcend that moment in the corridor, _never transcend that
smell_.

Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do
not like the play--the play at the theatre--because it invariably falls
short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not
for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the
stage, _Don Giovanni_, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois
play of Moliere; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that
all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand Spains are
distilled into my fancy!

The fact is that, being an appeal to the imagination of others, every
form of literature, every "deed of speech," as a friend of mine calls
it, has a natural stage in the mind of the reader or the listener.
Milton, let me point out, makes "gorgeous Tragedy in sceptred pall,"
sweep across, not the planks of a theatre, but the scholar's thought as
he sits alone with his book of nights. Neither is this an expression of
conceit. I do not mean that _my_ conception of this, that, or the other
is better, or as good as, what a great actor or a clever manager can
set before me. Nothing of the sort; but my conception _is better suited
to me_. Its very vagueness answers, nine times out of ten, to my
repugnance and my preference; and the high lights, the vividly realized
portions emerging from that vagueness, represent _what I like_. Hamlet
or Portia or Viola and Olivia, exist for me under the evocation of the
magician Shakespeare, but formed of recollections, impressions of
places, people, and other poets, floating coloured atomies, which have a
brooding charm, as being mine; why should they be scared off, replaced,
by detailed real personalities who, even if charming, are most likely
alien?

I cannot very well conceive how people enjoy such substitutions. Perhaps
they have more sensitive fancy and warmer sympathies than I; but as to
mine, I had rather they were let alone. I can quite understand that it
is different with child