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 Molière; 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 children and with uneducated persons: their imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling, much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with the intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of all places--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas of chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside, data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and seeing eyes, which M. Carrière has painted, just enough visible, in his usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M. Carrière's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, to children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a good deal of help from outward mechanism.