“I LOOKED down upon a great theatre,” said the Moon. “The house was crowded, for a new actor was to make his first appearance that night. My rays glided¹ over a little window in the wall, and I saw a painted face with the forehead pressed against the panes². It was the hero of the evening. The knighly beard curled crisply about the chin; but there were tears in the man’s eyes, for he had been hissed³ off, and indeed with reason. The poor Incapable⁴! But Incapables cannot be admitted into the empire of Art. He had deep feeling, and loved his art enthusiastically, but the art loved not him. The prompter’s bell sounded; ‘the hero enters with a determined⁵ air,’ so ran the stage direction in his part, and he had to appear before an audience who turned him into ridicule⁶. When the piece was over, I saw a form wrapped in a mantle⁷, creeping down the steps: it was the vanquished⁸ knight⁹ of the evening. The scene-shifters whispered to one another, and I followed the poor fellow home to his room. To hang one’s self is to die a mean death, and poison is not always at hand, I know; but he thought of both. I saw how he looked at his pale face in the glass, with eyes half closed, to see if he should look well as a corpse¹⁰. A man may be very unhappy, and yet exceedingly affected¹¹. He thought of death, of suicide; I believe he pitied himself, for he wept bitterly, and when a man has had his cry out he doesn’t kill himself.

“Since that time a year had rolled by. Again a play was to be acted, but in a little theatre, and by a poor strolling company. Again I saw the well-remembered face, with the painted cheeks and the crisp beard. He looked up at me and smiled; and yet he had been hissed off only a minute before—hissed off from a wretched theatre, by a miserable¹² audience. And tonight a shabby hearse rolled out of the town-gate. It was a suicide—our painted, despised hero. The driver of the hearse was the only person present, for no one followed except my beams. In a corner of the churchyard the corpse of the suicide was shovelled¹³ into the earth, and nettles¹⁴ will soon be growing rankly over his grave, and the sexton will throw thorns and weeds from the other graves upon it.”