delicacy, they may say, in speaking
of the first theatre in the world one day and of the London stage the
next. You must choose, and if you talk about one, you forfeit the right
to talk about the other. But I think there is something to be done in
the way of talking about both, and at all events there are few things it
is not fair to talk about if one does so with a serious desire to
understand. Removing lately from Paris to the British metropolis, I
received a great many impressions--a sort of unbroken chain, in which
the reflections passing through my fancy as I tried the different
orchestra-stalls were the concluding link. The impressions of which I
speak were impressions of outside things--the things with which in a
great city one comes first into contact. I supposed that I had gathered
them once for all in earlier years; but I found that the edge of one's
observation, unlike that of other trenchant instruments, grows again if
one leaves it alone. Remain a long time in any country, and you come to
accept the manners and customs of that country as the standard of
civilization--the normal type. Other manners and customs, even if they
spring from the same soil from which you yourself have sprung, acquire
by contrast an unreasonable, a violent, but often a picturesque relief.
To what one may call a continentalized vision the aspect of English life
seems strange and entertaining; while an Anglicized perception finds,
beyond the narrow channel, even greater matter for wonderment.

The writer of these lines brought with him, at the outset of a dusky
London winter, a continentalized, and perhaps more particularly a
Parisianized, fancy. It was wonderful how many things that I should have
supposed familiar and commonplace seemed strikingly salient and typical,
and how I found, if not sermons in stones and good in everything, at
least examples in porter-pots and reflections in coal-scuttles. In
writing the other day of the Theatre Francais, I spoke of M. Francisque
Sarcey, the esteemed dramatic critic; of the serious and deliberate way
in which he goes to work--of the distance from which he makes his
approaches. During the first weeks I was in London, especially when I
had been to the play the night before, I kept saying to myself that M.
Francisque Sarcey ought to come over and "do" the English theatres.
There are of course excellent reasons why he should not. In the first
place, it is safe to assume that he comprehends not a