In the evening, as she had said in writing to the Doctor, she went with Miss Skeat and sat in the front box of the theatre, which the great actor had placed at her disposal.  The play was Othello.  Mr. Barker had ascertained that she was going, and had accordingly procured himself a seat in the front of the orchestra.  He endeavoured to catch a look from Margaret all through the first part of the performance, but she was too entirely absorbed in the tragedy to notice him.  At length, in the interval before the last act, Mr. Barker took courage, and, leaving his chair, threaded his way out of the lines of seats to the entrance.  Then he presented himself at the door of the Countess’s box.

“May I come in for a little while?” he inquired with an affectation of doubt and delicacy that was unnatural to him.

“Certainly,” said Margaret indifferently, but smiling a little withal.

“I have ventured to bring you some marrons glaces,” said Barker, when he was seated, producing at the same time a neat bonbonniere in the shape of a turban.  “I thought they would remind you of Baden.  You used to be very fond of them.”

“Thanks,” said she, “I am still.”  And she took one.  The curtain rose, and Barker was obliged to be silent, much against his will.  Margaret immediately became absorbed in the doings on the stage.  She had witnessed that terrible last act twenty times before, but she never wearied of it.  Neither would she have consented to see it acted by any other than the great Italian.  Whatever be the merits of the play, there can be no question as to its supremacy of horror in the hands of Salvini.  To us of the latter half of this century it appears to stand alone; it seems as if there could never have been such a scene or such an actor in the history of the drama.  Horrible—­yes! beyond all description, but, being horrible, of a depth of horror unrealised before.  Perhaps no one who has not lived in the East can understand that such a character as Salvini’s Othello is a possible, living reality.  It is certain that American audiences, even while giving their admiration, withhold their belief.  They go to see Othello, that they may shudder luxuriously at the sight of so much suffering; for it is the moral suffering of the Moor that most impresses an intelligent beholder, but it is doubtful whether Americans or English, who have not lived in Southern or Eastern lands, are capable of appreciating that the character is drawn from the life.

The great criticism to which all modern tragedy, and a great deal of modern drama, are open is the undue and illegitimate use of horror.  Horror is not terror.  They are two entirely distinct affections.  A man hurled from a desperate precipice, in the living act to fall, is properly an object of terror, sudden and quaking.  But the same man, reduced to a mangled mass of lifeless humanity, broken to pieces, and ghastly with the gaping of dead wounds—­the same man, when his last leap is over and hope is fled, is an object of horror, and as such would not in early times have been regarded as a legitimate subject for artistic representation, either on the stage or in the plastic or pictorial arts.