Abroad he had been a valiant
first-nighter; but he learned presently that at home the house for a
premiere was composed largely of people whose tickets came from the
exposition of theatre "paper" throughout the week in their
storefronts--it was on Monday evening that they were paid off; and
he found himself little disposed to join in judgment with a raft of small
shop-keepers, until he recollected that a premiere was not a premiere,
after all--the play's footing having already been secured at some other
place, at some other time, before some other audience.
As for the picture-dealers, he complained that a canvas of any importance
was likely to be displayed after a fashion frankly mercantile, in the
show-window of the shop--a step which met more than halfway the public
demand for free art, but which unjustly caused many an original to be
taken for a copy. "Perhaps, though," he would say, "the public has got so
far along as to judge of a picture independent of its surroundings.
Possibly the crimson draperies and the row of gas-jets have really come
to be superfluous."
He missed, furthermore, many of his accustomed pleasures and
conveniences. He was astonished to find a metropolis without a promenade.
True, on Sunday afternoons there was a good deal of strolling up and down
along a half-mile of the lake shore; but he never observed that the
people whose houses overlooked all this strolling ever took any part in
it, and he never learned that they enjoyed this diversion anywhere else.
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