word of English;
and in the second, it is obligatory to believe that he would, in the
vulgar phrase, not be able to "stand" it. He would probably pronounce
the English stage hopelessly and unmitigably bad and beneath criticism,
and hasten back to Delaunay and Sarah Bernhardt. But if we could suppose
him to fight it out, and give the case a hearing, what a solid
dissertation we should have upon it afterward at the bottom of the
"Temps" newspaper! How he would go into the causes of the badness, and
trace its connections with English civilization! How earnestly he would
expatiate and how minutely he would explain; how fervently he would
point the moral and entreat his fellow countrymen not to be as the
English are lest they should lapse into histrionic barbarism!

I felt, to myself, during these days, in a small way, very much like a
Francisque Sarcey; I don't mean as to the gloominess of my conclusions,
but as to the diffusiveness of my method. A spectator with his senses
attuned to all those easy Parisian harmonies feels himself, in London,
to be in a place in which the drama cannot, in the nature of things,
have a vigorous life. Before he has put his feet into a theatre he is
willing to bet his little all that the stage will turn out to be weak.
If he is challenged for the reasons of this precipitate skepticism, he
will perhaps be at loss to give them; he will only say, "Oh, I don't
know, _cela se seut_. Everything I see is a reason. I don't look out of
the window, I don't ring the bell for some coals, I don't go into an
eating-house to dine, without seeing a reason." And then he will begin
to talk about the duskiness and oppressiveness of London; about the
ugliness of everything that one sees; about beauty and grace being
never attempted, or attempted here and there only to be wofully missed;
about the visible, palpable Protestantism; about the want of expression
in people's faces; about the plainness and dreariness of everything
that is public and the inaccessibility of everything that is private;
about the lower classes being too miserable to know the theatre, and
the upper classes too "respectable" to understand it.

And here, if the audacious person we are conceiving is very far gone,
he will probably begin to talk about English "hypocrisy" and prudery,
and to say that these are the great reason of the feebleness of the
stage. When he approaches the question of English "hypocrisy" you may
know that he is hopelessl