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Updated: May 22, 2025
How can an actor be away from this earth, moving before you in the spirit he has conjured up, only to be dragged back to himself and his actual surroundings of canvas and paint and tinsel and limelights by some disturbing influence in the audience or on the stage? If you want the best, if you love the art, foster it. It is worthy of your gentlest care and your kindest, tenderest thought.
No brass-bands played, none sang a ditty of triumph as I took my way; no signs of "Welcome to Our City" were hung across the street that day! Thus you and I and plain, plug mortals may show a courage high and fine, and be obscure, while some jay chortles in triumph where the limelights shine.
He takes you behind the scenes and lets you perceive for yourself how the `dummies' and machinery are managed, how rough the distemper painting, all beauty from the front of `the house, looks on nearer inspection, how the `lifts' work, and the `flats' are pushed on; besides disclosing all the secrets connected with masks and `properties. He is not content in merely allowing you to witness the piece from before the curtain, in the full glory of that distance from the place of action which lends enchantment to the view, and with all the deceptive concomitants of music and limelights and Bengal fire!
"And you come on immediately after the 'First Part, succeeding which I suppose Lohengrin will sing his Duck Ditty, while the Boy Scout, dressed as Uncle Tom's Cabin, after biting the triggers off all the guns, and pulling his wig well down over his eyes" imitating the action "will sally forth into the limpid limelights, and after he has been shot once in the face by a 16-inch howitzer and has been played upon in the rear by a battery of machine guns, he will limp on with the regular limp of the old Virginia servant and die at your feet, but not until I have whispered their secret into the heel of your boot."
At least, when it lifted, there she was in her white garments, surrounded by women and guards, engaged apparently in making an oration, for although I could not hear a word, I could see by the motions of her arms that she was speaking. Had she been the central figure in some stage scene, no limelights could have set her off to better advantage, than did those of the heavens above her.
No brass-bands played, none sang a ditty of triumph as I took my way; no signs of "Welcome to Our City" were hung across the street that day! Thus you and I and plain, plug mortals may show a courage high and fine, and be obscure, while some jay chortles in triumph where the limelights shine.
An electric bell trilled, the limelights shut off, with a jerk that made the eyes ache, a back-cloth soared aloft and another glided down into its place, the comedian took two, three, four calls, then vanished into a horde of dim figures scuttling about in the gloom. An electric bell trilled again and deep silence fell once more, broken only by the hissing of the lights.
Charlotte Brontë and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of coda of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured lenses.
There were no limelights or stereopticon pictures to add to the illusion, only the disconcerting faces and the light of day. He never before knew how bright the day could be but he continued to stand there, in spite of the ludicrous and trying position. He sang, a certain daredevil light in his eye now, a suspicion of a covert smile on his face.
As he made each of his carefully studied points, he paused, confident of the vast rustle of laughter swelling into a hurricane of applause which never failed to come from the towering tiers of humanity before him, stretching away into the roof where the limelights blazed and spluttered. Save for the low murmur of voices at her side, the silence behind the scenes was absolute. No one was idle.
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