[Original]

LEFT London exactly twelve months from the day on which I had started to fulfill my first provincial engagement, and I did not return to it again while I was an actor. I left it with my baggage early in the morning by the newspaper express from Euston; I returned to it late at night, footsore and hungry, and with no other possessions than the clothes I stood upright in.

Of the last few months of my professional life, the following brief extracts will speak. A slightly bitter tone runs through some of them, but at the time they were written I was suffering great disappointment, and everything was going wrong with me—circumstances under which a man is perhaps apt to look upon his surroundings through smoke-colored glasses.

Three weeks after Christmas I write:

“... good and money regular.

“Business is almost always good, though, at pantomime time: the test will come later on, when we begin to travel. How a provincial audience does love a pantomime! and how I do hate it! I can’t say I think very highly of provincial audiences. They need a lot of education in art. They roar over coarse buffoonery, and applaud noisy rant to the echo. One might as well go to Billingsgate to study English as to the provinces to learn acting.

“I played First Low Comedy on Saturday night at half an hour’s notice, the real First Low Comedy being hopelessly intoxicated at the time. It’s a pity, amidst all the talk about the elevation of the stage, that the elevation of actors is not a less frequent occurrence. It can hardly improve the reputation of the profession in the eyes of the public, when they take up the Era and read advertisement after advertisement, ending with such lines as, ‘None but sober people need apply,’ ‘Must contrive to keep sober, at all events during the performance.’ ‘People who are constantly getting drunk need not write.’ I’ve known some idiots actually make themselves half tipsy on purpose before coming on the stage, evidently thinking, because they can’t act when they’ve got all their few wits about them, that they’ll manage better if they get rid of them altogether. There is a host of wonderful traditions floating about the theatrical world of this, that, and the other great actor having always played this, that, and the other part while drunk; and so, when some wretched little actor has to take one of these parts, he, fired by a noble determination to follow in the footsteps of his famous predecessor, gets drunk too.

“Bad language is another thing that the profession might spare a lot of, and still have enough remaining for all ordinary purposes. I remember a penny each time we swore. We gave it up after two hours’ trial: none of us had any money left.”