XI
BEFORE AND AFTER
To my astonishment I could find no trace of the old publishing house which I had so often visited; nothing but scaffolding and boardings. Like so many London premises it had "come down" almost in a night. But my resentment was a little softened when looking through the chinks between the boards I discovered that the supplanting building was to be a theatre. I could see the bare bones of an auditorium, the deep foundations for the stage and so forth. And as I stood peering there I tried to realise some of the excitement and fun which were to be engendered among those girders and stones, so soon to be animated by that blend of mirth and thrills which makes a theatrical night's entertainment? To-day the place was a wilderness; to-morrow crowds would be gathered there. How bright would be the lights, how gay the music, how the walls, now mere skeletons, would echo and re-echo to laughter and applause!
All new building is exciting, but there was something peculiarly attractive in the thought that this great hole in the ground was, when ultimately enclosed by its bricks and mortar and decoration, to be a friendly playhouse.
What so cheerless as iron girders and scaffold poles? What so enkindling as the overture to a play in a crowded, anticipatory theatre?
As I stood at the opening in the hoarding, thinking these thoughts and becoming every moment an object of deeper suspicion to a watchful constable, it was borne in upon me that I had not so very long ago witnessed the very antithesis of the present scene. I say not so very long ago, meaning distance in time; only three or four years. But in history a distance vast indeed; for that was before the War, in the spacious days when travellers could leave England on an impulse, as they can no more, and passports were seldom needed, and France was gay, and Italy was careless, and Louvain had a library, and sovereigns were made not of paper but of gold. Strange, remote Utopian period! At that time when I had so different a spectacle before my eyes, I was in that beautiful land where decay is lovely too—I mean, of course, Italy—and the particular part of Italy was the brown city of Verona, at which I was stopping for a few hours on the way from Venice, to see the ruins of the Roman theatre.
These ruins can for several reasons very easily be overlooked by travellers. One is that the lure of the Coliseum is so powerful; another, that the wonderful church of S. Zeno must first be visited, and there is then often little time for anything else but the tombs of the Scaligers and poor Juliet's reputed last earthly tabernacle. The Roman theatre, moreover, is rather out of the way; and, well, is not the Coliseum Roman theatre enough? So you see how easy it is not to do Verona full justice. And a further obstacle to the examination of the theatre's ruins is that they demand agility and endurance in no meagre supply, for one has to climb to great heights, and leap chasms and descend perilously, like a mountain goat. And Verona is usually exceedingly hot.
Yet no one visiting Verona should miss this ghost of a playhouse, for, having seen it, another gap in one's mental picture of Roman civilisation is filled. It is there possible to visualize the audience arriving, traversing the long passages in search of their seats, recognising their friends, jesting in their saturnine way, and then sitting down to the joys of the performance. Terence and Plautus at Westminster thereafter should become twice as interesting.
Ruined as it is, the theatre yet retains enough for the imagination to build upon, and it illustrates, too, the stationary character of dramatic architecture. Upon the ancient scheme our modern erectors of theatres have grafted only trifling inessential modifications; the main lines are the same. Possibly if anything, there has been a decline, for one thinks of a Roman architect as being thorough enough to test the view of the stage from every point of the house, whereas in England there are, I am sure, architects who have never thought it worth while to visit the gallery.