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Updated: June 24, 2025
There are no foot-lights, but the best theory of stage lighting is that there should be none. One of the most effective scenes in the modern theater is the court setting in Galsworthy's Justice. The lighting is indirect and the spots of red and green lights at the judge's desk, the corners of the jury-box and the shaded ones at the clerk's elbow, give a remarkable impression of mysterious terror.
I remember how broad a gap the green floor of the stage made to the shining tin foot-lights; how the thousand brassy, mocking eyes were centred on the lean figure that moved forward; how I heard a weak quaver going up, and knew it to be my own voice: I remember nothing more until the scene was ended: the test and last scene of the opera it had been: and as the curtain fell, it was stopped by a faint, dismal hiss that grew slowly louder and more venomous, was mingled with laughs and jeers from the gallery, and the play was damned.
And accordingly they do come forward and are seen in a famous passage. Rawdon makes his unexpected return home from prison, and Becky's unfortunate disaster overtakes her, so to say, in our very presence. Perhaps I may seem to exaggerate the change of method which I note at this point; but does it not appear to any one, glancing back at his recollection of the book, that this particular scene is defined and relieved and lighted differently, somehow, from the stream of impressions in which it is set? A space is cleared for it, the stage is swept. This is now no retrospective vision, shared with Thackeray; it is a piece of present action with which we are confronted. It is strictly dramatic, and I suppose it is good drama of its kind. But there is more to be said of it than this more to be said, even when it has been admitted to be drama of rather a high-pitched, theatrical strain. The foot-lights, it is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flare before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before. And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal attraction for him; so that if he is theatrical here, it is not because he inevitably would be, given his chance. It is rather because he must, at all costs, make this climax of his story conclusively tell; and in order to do so he is forced to use devices of some crudity for him they are crude because his climax, his scène
He bethought him, moreover, of what he had once heard her say that while she could fairly well make out the people in the galleries and boxes, those who were sitting in the stalls close to the orchestra were, by reason of the glare of the foot-lights, quite invisible to her.
In the course of a very few years we have seen "The Wandering Jew;" "Belshazzar's Feast;" "Nebuchadnezzar:" and the "Massacre of the Innocents;" "Joseph and his Brethren;" "The Passage of the Red Sea;" and "The Deluge." The great Dumas, like Madame Sand before mentioned, has brought a vast quantity of religion before the foot-lights.
When I had sufficiently gratified them by displaying the lump of brass and glass, I remarked that I would appear on the next evening as Jem Baggs in the Wandering Minstrel. This announcement was received with shouts of approbation; and bowing almost to the foot-lights, I withdrew.
No doubt he was preparing it, the bloody, exciting story which would bring him before the foot-lights again, and make him once more the lion of a day. More social flatteries, more doubtful love-affairs! Fools like herself would feel his spell, would cherish and caress him, only to be stung and scathed as she had been.
Then there were a number of young women who, though fond of attending the theatre, looked askance at the clever men and women whose business it was to amuse them. They approved of the theatre, but for them the foot-lights divided the two worlds, and they wished no trespassing of the stage folks on their territory.
He dressed with unusual care, and was a noticeably handsome figure as he sat alone in the box; and elated, tense, self-conscious. When she came on and walked close down to the foot-lights nearest him, flashing a glance of recognition into his eyes, his breath quickened and his face flushed. A swift interchange of light and fire took place at the moment, her eyelids fell.
The monk's heart was not too shrivelled to flow with human kindness, and the dancer had not unlearned in the glare of the foot-lights the graces of a gentleman. I profess to be a man of peace. Through training, environment, and calling I ought to be so, and yet there is a fibre in any make-up which has always throbbed strangely to the drum. Is it perhaps a streak of heredity?
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