The cord was effective, did all I wanted: after this experience I wore it regularly and within a week was again able to walk under the bar and afterwards jump it, able to pull myself up with one hand till my chin was above the bar. I had conquered temptation and once more was captain of my body. The second unsuspected experience was also a direct result, I believe, of my sex awakening with Lucille and the intense sex-excitement. At all events it came just after the love passages with her that I have described and post hoc is often propter hoc. I had never yet noticed the beauties of nature; indeed, whenever I came across descriptions of scenery In my reading, I always skipped them as wearisome. Now of a sudden, in a moment, my eyes were unsealed to natural beauties. I remember the scene and my rapt wonder as if it were yesterday. It was a bridge across the Dee near Overton in full sunshine; on my right the river made a long curve, swirling deep under a wooded height, leaving a little tawny sand bank half bare just opposite to me: on my left both banks, thickly wooded, drew together and passed round a curve out of sight. I was entranced and speechless-enchanted by the sheer color-beauty of the scene-sunlit water there and shadowed here, reflecting the gorgeous vesture of the wooded height. And when I left the place and came out again and looked at the adjoining cornfields, golden against the green of the hedgerows and scattered trees, the colors took on a charm I had never noticed before: I could not understand what had happened to me. It was the awakening of sex-life in me, I believe, that first revealed to me the beauty of inanimate nature. A night or two later I was ravished by a moon nearly at the full that flooded our playing field with ivory radiance, making the haystack in the corner a thing of supernal beauty. Why had I never before seen the wonder of the world, the sheer loveliness of nature all about me? From this time on I began to enjoy descriptions of scenery in the books I read, and began, too, to love landscapes in painting. Thank goodness! the miracle was accomplished, at long last, and my life enriched, ennobled, transfigured as by the bounty of God! From that day on I began to live an enchanted life, for at once I tried to see beauty everywhere and at all times of day and night caught glimpses that ravished me with delight and turned my being into a hymn of praise and joy. Faith had left me, and with faith, hope in heaven or indeed in any future existence: saddened and fearful, I was as one in prison with an undetermined sentence; but now in a moment the prison had become a paradise, the walls of the actual had fallen away into frames of entrancing pictures. Dimly I became conscious that if this life were sordid and mean, petty and unpleasant, the fault was in myself and in my blindness. I began then for the first time to understand that I myself was a magician and could create my own fairyland, ay, and my own heaven, transforming this world into the throne-room of a god! This joy and this belief I want to impart to others more than almost anything else, for this has been to me a new Gospel of courage and resolve and certain reward, a man's creed teaching that as you grow in wisdom and courage and kindness, all good things are added unto you. I find that I am outrunning my story and giving here a stage of thought and belief that only became mine much later; but the beginning of my individual soul-life was this experience, that I had been blind to natural beauty and now could see; this was the root and germ, so to speak, of the later faith that guided all my mature life, filling me with courage and spilling over into hope and joy ineffable.
Very soon the first command of it came to my lips almost every hour: «Blame your own blindness! Always blame yourself!»
Chapter IV. From School to America
Early in January there was a dress rehearsal of the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice. The grandee of the neighborhood who owned the great park, Sir. W. W. W., some M. P.'s, notably a Mr. Whalley, who had a pretty daughter and lived in the vicinity, and the vicar and his family were invited, and others whom I did not know; but with the party from the vicarage came Lucille.
The big schoolroom had been arranged as a sort of theatre and the estrada at one end, where the head-master used to throne it on official occasions, was converted into a makeshift stage and draped by a big curtain that could be drawn back or forth at will. The Portia was a very handsome lad of sixteen named Herbert, gentle and kindly, yet redeemed from effeminacy by the fact that he was the fleetest sprinter in the school and could do the hundred yards in eleven and a half seconds. The Duke was, of course, Jones; and the merchant, Antonio, a big fellow named Vernon; and I had got Edwards the part of Bassanio; and a pretty boy in the fourth form was taken as Nerissa. So far as looks went the cast was passable; but the Duke recited his lines as if they had been imperfectly learned and so the trial scene opened badly. But the part of Shylock suited me intimately and I had learned how to recite. Now before E… and Lucille, I was set on doing better than my best. When my cue came, I bowed low before the Duke and then bowed again to left and right of him in silence and formally, as if I, the outcast Jew, were saluting the whole court; then in a voice that at first I simply made slow and clear and hard, I began the famous reply: I have possessed your Grace of what I purpose; And by our Holy Sabbath have I sworn To have the due and forfeit of my bond. I don't expect to be believed; but nevertheless I am telling the bare truth when I say that in my impersonation of Shylock I brought in the very piece of «business» that made Henry Irving's Shylock fifteen years later «ever memorable,» according to the papers. When at the end, baffled and beaten, Shylock gives in: I pray you, give me leave to go from hence, I am not welclass="underline" send the deed after me, And I will sign it, the Duke says, «Get thee gone, but do it,» and Gratiano insults the Jew- the only occasion, I think, when Shakespeare allows the beaten to be insulted by a gentleman. On my way to the door as Shylock I stopped, bent low before the Duke's dismissal; but at Gratiano's insult, I turned slowly round, while drawing myself up to my full height and scanning him from head to foot. Irving used to return all across the stage, and folding his arms on his breast, look down on him with measureless contempt. When, fifteen years later, Irving, at the Garrick Club one night after supper asked me what I thought of this new «business,» I replied that if Shylock had done what he did, Gratiano would probably have spat in his face and then kicked him off the stage. Shylock complains that the Christians spat upon his gaberdine. My boyish, romantic reading of the part, however, was essentially the same as Irving's, and Irving's reading was cheered in London to the echo because it was a rehabilitation of the Jew; and the Jew rules the roost today in all the cities of Europe. At my first words I could feel the younger members of the audience look about as if to see if such reciting as mine was proper and permitted, then one after the other gave in to the flow and flood of passion. When I had finished everyone cheered, Whalley and Lady W… enthusiastically, and to my delight, Lucille as well. After the rehearsal, everyone crowded about me. «Where did you learn?» «Who taught you?» At length Lucille came. «I knew you were someone,» she said in her pretty way (quelqu'un), «but it was extraordinary! You'll be a great actor, I'm sure.» «And yet you deny me a kiss,» I whispered, taking care no one should hear. «I deny you nothing,» she replied, turning away, leaving me transfixed with hope and assurance of delight. «Nothing,» I said to myself, «nothing means everything»; a thousand times I said it over to myself in an ecstasy.