The Free Admission

A Free Admission is the lotos of the mind: the leaf in which your name is inscribed as having the privileges of the entrée for the season is of an oblivious quality – an antidote for half the ills of life. I speak here not of a purchased but of a gift-ticket, an emanation of the generosity of the Managers, a token of conscious desert. With the first you can hardly bring yourself to go to the theatre; with the last, you cannot keep away. If you have paid five guineas for a free-admission for the season, this free-admission turns to a mere slavery. You seem to have done a foolish thing, and to have committed an extravagance under the plea of economy. You are struck with remorse. You are impressed with a conviction that pleasure is not to be bought. You have paid for your privilege in the lump, and you receive the benefit in driblets. The five pounds you are out of pocket does not meet with an adequate compensation the first night, or on any single occasion – you must come again, and use double diligence to strike a balance to make up your large arrears; instead of an obvious saving, it hangs as a dead-weight on your satisfaction all the year; and the improvident price you have paid for them kills every ephemeral enjoyment, and poisons the flattering illusions of the scene. You have incurred a debt, and must go every night to redeem it; and as you do not like being tied to the oar, or making a toil of a pleasure, you stay away altogether; give up the promised luxury as a bad speculation; sit sullenly at home, or bend your loitering feet in any other direction; and putting up with the first loss, resolve never to be guilty of the like folly again. But it is not thus with the possessor of a Free Admission, truly so called. His is a pure pleasure, a clear gain. He feels none of these irksome qualms and misgivings. He marches to the theatre like a favoured lover; if he is compelled to absent himself, he feels all the impatience and compunction of a prisoner. The portal of the Temple of the Muses stands wide open to him, closing the vista of the day – when he turns his back upon it at night with steps gradual and slow, mingled with the common crowd, but conscious of a virtue which they have not, he says, ‘I shall come again to-morrow!’ In passing through the streets, he casts a side-long, careless glance at the playbills: he reads the papers chiefly with a view to see what is the play for the following day, or the ensuing week. If it is something new, he is glad; if it is old, he is resigned – but he goes in either case. His steps bend mechanically that way – 192pleasure becomes a habit, and habit a duty – he fulfils his destiny – he walks deliberately along Long-acre (you may tell a man going to the play,¹ and whether he pays or has a free admission) – quickens his pace as he turns the corner of Bow-street, and arrives breathless and in haste at the welcome spot, where on presenting himself, he receives a passport that is a release from care, thought, toil, for the evening, and wafts him into the regions of the blest! What is it to him how the world turns round if the play goes on: whether empires rise or fall, so that Covent-Garden stands its ground? Shall he plunge into the void of politics, that volcano burnt-out with the cold, sterile, sightless lava, hardening all around? or con over the registers of births, deaths, and marriages, when he may be present at Juliet’s wedding, and gaze on Juliet’s tomb? or shall he wonder at the throng of coaches in Regent-street, when he can feast his eyes with the coach (the fairy-vision of his childhood) in which Cinderella rides to the ball? Here (by the help of that Open Sessame! a Free Admission), ensconced in his favourite niche, looking from the ‘loop-holes of retreat’² in the second circle, he views the pageant of the world played before him; melts down years to moments; sees human life, like a gaudy shadow, glance across the stage; and here tastes of all earth’s bliss, the sweet without the bitter, the honey without the sting, and plucks ambrosial fruits and amaranthine flowers (placed by the enchantress Fancy within his reach,) without having to pay a tax for it at the time, or repenting of it afterwards. He is all ear and eye, and drinks in sounds or sights that might ‘create a soul under the ribs of death.’³ ‘The fly,’ says Gay, ‘that sips treacle, is lost in the sweets:’⁴ so he that has a free-admission forgets every thing else. Why not? It is the cheap and enviable transfer of his being from the real to the unreal world, and the changing half his life into a dream. Oh! leave me to my repose,’⁵ in my beloved corner at Covent-Garden Theatre! This (and not ‘the arm-chair at an inn,’ though that too, at other times, and under different circumstances, is not without its charms,) is to me ‘the throne of felicity.’⁶ If I have business that would detain me from this, I put it off till the morrow; if I have friends that call in just at the moment, let them go away under pain of bearing my maledictions with them. What is there in their conversation to atone to me for the loss of one quarter of an hour at the ‘witching time of night?’⁷ If it is on indifferent subjects, it is flat and insipid; if it grows animated and interesting, it requires a painful effort, and begets a feverish excitement. But let me once reach, and fairly establish myself in this favourite seat, and I can bid a gay defiance to mischance,⁸ and leave debts and duns, friends and foes, objections and arguments, far behind me. I would, if I could, have it surrounded with a balustrade of gold, for it has been to me a palace of delight. There golden thoughts unbidden betide me, and golden visions come to me. There the dance, the laugh, the song, the scenic deception greet me; there are wafted Shakespear’s winged words, or Otway’s plaintive lines; and there how often have I heard young Kemble’s voice,⁹ trembling at its own beauty, and prolonging its liquid tones, like the murmur of the billowy surge on 193sounding shores! There I no longer torture a sentence or strain a paradox: the mind is full without an effort, pleased without asking why. It inhales an atmosphere of joy, and is steeped in all the luxury of woe. To show how much sympathy has to do with the effect, let us suppose any one to have a free admission to the rehearsals of a morning, what mortal would make use of it? One might as well be at the bottom of a well, or at the top of St Paul’s for any pleasure we should derive from the finest tragedy or comedy. No, a play is nothing without an audience, it is a satisfaction too great and too general not to be shared with others. But reverse this cold and comfortless picture – let the eager crowd beset the theatre-doors ‘like bees in spring-time, when the sun with Taurus rides’¹⁰ – let the boxes be filled with innocence and beauty like beds of lilies on the first night of Isabella or Belvidera,¹¹ see the flutter, the uneasy delight of expectation, see the big tear roll down the cheek of sensibility as the story proceeds – let us listen to the deep thunder of the pit, or catch the gallery’s shout at some true master-stroke of passion; and we feel that a thousand hearts are beating in our bosoms, and hail the sparkling illusion reflected in a thousand eyes. The stage has, therefore, been justly styled ‘a discipline of humanity;’¹² for there is no place where the social principle is called forth with such strength and harmony, by a powerful interest in a common object. A crowd is everywhere else oppressive; but the fuller the play-house, the more intimately and cordially do we sympathize with every individual in it. Empty benches have as bad an effect on the spectator as on the players. This is one reason why so many mistakes are made with respect to plays and players, ere they come before the public. The taste is crude and uninformed till it is ripened by the blaze of lighted lamps and the sunshine of happy faces: the cold, critical faculty, the judgment of Managers and Committees asks the glow of sympathy and the buzz of approbation to prompt and guide it. We judge in a crowd with the sense and feelings of others; and from the very strength of the impression, fancy we should have come to the same unavoidable conclusion had we been left entirely to ourselves. Let any one try the experiment by reading a manuscript play, or seeing it acted – or by hearing a candidate for the stage rehearse behind the scenes, or top his part after the orchestra have performed their fatal prelude. Nor is the air of a play-house favourable only to social feeling – it aids the indulgence of solitary musing. The brimming cup of joy or sorrow is full; but it runs over to other thoughts and subjects. We can there (nowhere better) ‘retire, the world shut out, our thoughts call home.’¹³ We hear the revelry and the shout, but ‘the still, small voice’¹⁴ of other years and cherished recollections is not wanting. It is pleasant to hear Miss Ford repeat Love’s Catechism,¹⁵ or Mrs Humby^* sing ‘I cannot marry Crout:’¹⁶ but the ear is not therefore deaf to Mrs Jordan’s laugh in Nell;¹⁷ Mrs Goodall’s Rosalind¹⁸ still haunts the glades of Arden, and the echo of Amiens’ song, ‘Blow, blow, thou winter’s 194wind,’¹⁹ lingers through a lapse of thirty years. A pantomime (the Little Red Riding-Hood) recalls the innocence of our childish thoughts: a dance (the Minuet de la Cour) throws us back to the gorgeous days of Louis XIV and tells us that the age of chivalry is gone for ever.²⁰ Who will be the Mrs Siddons of a distant age? What future Kean shall ‘strut and fret his hour upon the stage,’²¹ full of genius and free from errors? What favourite actor or actress will be taking their farewell benefit a hundred years hence? What plays and what players will then amuse the town? Oh, many-coloured scenes of human life! where are ye more truly represented than in the mirror of the stage? or where is that eternal principle of vicissitude which rules over ye, the painted pageant and the sudden gloom, more strikingly exemplified than here? At the entrance to our great theatres, in large capitals over the front of the stage, might be written Mutability! Does not the curtain that falls each night on the pomps and vanities it was withdrawn awhile to reveal (and the next moment all is dark) afford a fine moral lesson? Here, in small room, is crowded the map of human life; the lengthened, varied scroll is unfolded like rich tapestry with its quaint and flaunting devices spread out; whatever can be saved from the giddy whirl of ever-rolling time and of this round orb, which moves on and never stops,^* all that can strike the sense, can touch the heart, can stir up laughter or call tears from their secret source, is here treasured up and displayed ostentatiously – here is Fancy’s motley wardrobe, the masks of all the characters that were ever played – here is a glass set up clear and large enough to show us our own features and those of all mankind – here, in this enchanted mirror, are represented, not darkly, but in vivid hues and bold relief, the struggle of Life and Death, the momentary pause between the cradle and the grave, with charming hopes and fears, terror and pity in a thousand modes, strange and ghastly apparitions, the events of history, the fictions of poetry (warm from the heart); all these, and more than can be numbered in my feeble page, fill that airy space where the green curtain rises, and haunt it with evanescent shapes and indescribable yearnings. See o’er the stage the ghost of Hamlet stalks,Othello rages, Desdemona mourns,And poor Monimia pours her soul in love.²²