There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain stationer’s shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the city of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a party to behold10 the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those days I loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself had been enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in working order, with a “forest set,” a “combat,” and a few “robbers carousing” in the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell the name: was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin12, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I would long to see the rest! how — if the name by chance were hidden — I would wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal13 legend justified14 his attitude and strange apparel! And then to go within, to announce yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to undo15 those bundles and breathlessly devour16 those pages of gesticulating villains17, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships, frowning fortresses18 and prison vaults19 — it was a giddy joy. That shop, which was dark and smelt20 of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered, leave it. It was a place besieged21; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the stick’s end, frowned us down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we were trusted with another, and, increditable as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or with empty hand. Old Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation22, once swept the treasures from before me, with the cry: “I do not believe, child, that you are an intending purchaser at all!” These were the dragons of the garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity. The crux23 of Buridan’s donkey was as nothing to the uncertainty24 of the boy as he handled and lingered and doated on these bundles of delight; there was a physical pleasure in the sight and touch of them which he would jealously prolong; and when at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the impatient shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio25, and the boy was forth26 again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into light in the blue winter’s even, and The Miller, or The Rover, or some kindred drama clutched against his side — on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed aloud in exultation27! I can hear that laughter still. Out of all the years of my life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare with these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the Arabian Entertainments in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember, when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might!
The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit. Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable28, as set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy29 of the scenes and characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: “Scene 6. The Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of stage and hermitage, Fig11. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting30 direction” — such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to be called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of The Blind Boy, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince and once, I think, abducted31, I know nothing. And The Old Oak Chest, what was it all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious32 number of banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in the third act (was it in the third?) — they are all fallen in a deliquium, swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite forget that child who, wilfully33 foregoing pleasure, stoops to “twopence coloured.” With crimson34 lake (hark to the sound of it — crimson lake! — the horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear) — with crimson lake and Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks especially, Titian could not equal.
The latter colour with gamboge, a hated name although an exquisite35 pigment36, supplied a green of such a savoury greenness that today my heart regrets it. Nor can I recall without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I dipped my brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all was painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might, indeed, set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was simply sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium37, the worry, and the long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days after the purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to complain; they thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person can be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and dishes; I had got the marrow38 of it and said grace.
Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that enticing39 double file of names, where poetry, for the true child of Skelt, reigned40 happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and are still but names. The Floating Beacon41 — why was that denied me? or The Wreck42 Ashore43? Sixteen-string Jack whom I did not even guess to be a highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers44; and there is one sequence of three from that enchanted45 calender that I still at times recall, like a loved verse of poetry: Lodoiska, Silver Palace, Echo of Westminster Bridge. Names, bare names, are surely more to children than we poor, grown-up, obliterated46 fools remember.
The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting47 in Skelt’s nest. And now we have reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even to be found, with reverence48 be it said, among the works of nature. The stagey is its generic49 name; but it is an old, insular50, home-bred staginess; not French, domestically British; not of today, but smacking51 of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama52: a peculiar53 fragrance54 haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity55. I will not insist upon the art of Skelt’s purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and incomparable costume, today look somewhat pallidly56; the extreme hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the villain’s scowl57 no longer thrills me like a trumpet58; and the scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the impartial59 critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity60 of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour61, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque62, a thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom — or, shall we say, the kingdom of Transpontus? — had a prevailing63 character. Whether it set forth Poland as in The Blind Boy, or Bohemia with The Miller and His Men, or Italy with The Old Oak Chest, still it was Transpontus. A botanist64 could tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all pervasive65, running wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato tree, and Quercus Skeltica — brave growths. The caves were all embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d’Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But on these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the accidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming. How the roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how the congregated66 clouds themselves up-roll, as stiff as bolsters67! Here is the cottage interior, the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn (this drama must be nautical68, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock; and there again is that impressive dungeon69 with the chains, which was so dull to colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames — England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal, radiating pure romance — still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned70 the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. I. “This is mastering me,” as Whitman cries, upon some lesser71 provocation72. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity73. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a good old melodrama, ’tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree — that set piece — I seem to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive74, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment75; met there the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of Der Freischutz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty76 Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact77 all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader — and yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73 Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly78, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock’s, or to Clarke’s of Garrick Street. In Pollock’s list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations79: Wreck Ashore and Sixteen-String Jack; and I cherish the belief that when these shall see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street — E. W., I think, the postal80 district — close below the fool’s-cap of St. Paul’s, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt himself, the aboriginal81 all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a choking heart — I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
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1
juvenile
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| n.青少年，少年读物；adj.青少年的，幼稚的 | |
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majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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jack
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| n.插座，千斤顶，男人；v.抬起，提醒，扛举；n.（Jake）杰克 | |
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miller
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| n.磨坊主 | |
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smuggler
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| n.走私者 | |
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robin
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| n.知更鸟，红襟鸟 | |
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hood
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| n.头巾，兜帽，覆盖；v.罩上，以头巾覆盖 | |
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procured
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| v.（努力）取得， （设法）获得( procure的过去式和过去分词 )；拉皮条 | |
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10
behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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fig
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| n.无花果(树) | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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undo
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| vt.解开，松开；取消，撤销 | |
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devour
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| v.吞没；贪婪地注视或谛听，贪读；使着迷 | |
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17
villains
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| n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 )；罪犯；（小说、戏剧等中的）反面人物；淘气鬼 | |
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18
fortresses
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| 堡垒，要塞( fortress的名词复数 ) | |
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vaults
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| n.拱顶( vault的名词复数 )；地下室；撑物跳高；墓穴 | |
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20
smelt
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| v.熔解，熔炼；n.银白鱼，胡瓜鱼 | |
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21
besieged
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| 包围，围困，围攻( besiege的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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22
vacillation
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| n.动摇；忧柔寡断 | |
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crux
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| adj.十字形；难事，关键，最重要点 | |
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24
uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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portfolio
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| n.公事包；文件夹；大臣及部长职位 | |
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26
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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28
fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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31
abducted
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| 劫持，诱拐( abduct的过去式和过去分词 )； 使（肢体等）外展 | |
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prodigious
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| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
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33
wilfully
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| adv.任性固执地；蓄意地 | |
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34
crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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pigment
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| n.天然色素，干粉颜料 | |
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tedium
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| n.单调；烦闷 | |
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marrow
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| n.骨髓；精华；活力 | |
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enticing
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| adj.迷人的；诱人的 | |
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40
reigned
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| vi.当政，统治（reign的过去式形式） | |
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41
beacon
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| n.烽火，（警告用的）闪火灯，灯塔 | |
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42
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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43
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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44
slumbers
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| 睡眠，安眠( slumber的名词复数 ) | |
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45
enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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46
obliterated
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| v.除去( obliterate的过去式和过去分词 )；涂去；擦掉；彻底破坏或毁灭 | |
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47
flaunting
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| adj.招摇的，扬扬得意的，夸耀的v.炫耀，夸耀( flaunt的现在分词 )；有什么能耐就施展出来 | |
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48
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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49
generic
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| adj.一般的，普通的，共有的 | |
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insular
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| adj.岛屿的，心胸狭窄的 | |
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51
smacking
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| 活泼的，发出响声的，精力充沛的 | |
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52
melodrama
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| n.音乐剧；情节剧 | |
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53
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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54
fragrance
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| n.芬芳，香味，香气 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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56
pallidly
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| adv.无光泽地，苍白无血色地 | |
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57
scowl
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| vi.(at)生气地皱眉，沉下脸，怒视；n.怒容 | |
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58
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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59
impartial
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| adj.(in,to)公正的，无偏见的 | |
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60
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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61
glamour
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| n.魔力，魅力；vt.迷住 | |
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62
picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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pervasive
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| adj.普遍的；遍布的，(到处)弥漫的；渗透性的 | |
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66
congregated
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| （使）集合，聚集( congregate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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67
bolsters
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| n.长枕( bolster的名词复数 )；垫子；衬垫；支持物v.支持( bolster的第三人称单数 )；支撑；给予必要的支持；援助 | |
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nautical
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| adj.海上的，航海的，船员的 | |
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dungeon
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| n.地牢，土牢 | |
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70
adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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72
provocation
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| n.激怒，刺激，挑拨，挑衅的事物，激怒的原因 | |
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73
immaturity
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| n.不成熟；未充分成长；未成熟；粗糙 | |
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obtrusive
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| adj.显眼的；冒失的 | |
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75
enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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enact
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| vt.制定(法律)；上演，扮演 | |
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78
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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79
aspirations
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| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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80
postal
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| adj.邮政的，邮局的 | |
参考例句： |
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81
aboriginal
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| adj.（指动植物）土生的，原产地的，土著的 | |
参考例句： |
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