ladies--usually with
several ladies--and remain with them; they sit still in their places,
and don't go herding out between the acts with their hats askew.
Altogether they are much more the sort of people to spend a quiet
evening with than the clever, cynical, democratic multitude that surges
nightly out of the brilliant Boulevards into those temples of the drama
in which MM. Dumas, _fils_, and Sardou are the high priests. But you
might spend your evening with them better almost anywhere than at the
theatre.

As I said just now, they are much more _naif_ than Parisian
spectators--at least as regards being amused. They cry with much less
facility, but they laugh more freely and heartily. I remember nothing
in Paris that corresponds with the laugh of the English gallery and
pit--with its continuity and simplicity, its deep-lunged jollity and
its individual guffaws. But you feel that an English audience is
intellectually much less appreciative. A Paris audience, as regards
many of its factors, is cynical, skeptical, indifferent; it is so
intimately used to the theatre that it doesn't stand on ceremony; it
yawns, and looks away and turns its back; it has seen too much, and it
knows too much. But it has the critical and the artistic sense, when
the occasion appeals to them; it can judge and discriminate. It has the
sense of form and of manner; it heeds and cares how things are done,
even when it cares little for the things themselves. Bohemians,
artists, critics, connoisseurs--all Frenchmen come more or less under
these heads, which give the tone to a body of Parisian spectators.
These do not strike one as "nice people" in the same degree as a
collection of English patrons of the drama--though doubtless they have
their own virtues and attractions; but they form a natural, sympathetic
public, while the English audience forms only a conventional,
accidental one. It may be that the drama and other works of art are
best appreciated by people who are not "nice"; it may be that a lively
interest in such matters tends to undermine niceness; it may be that,
as the world grows nicer, various forms of art will grow feebler. All
this _may_ be; I don't pretend to say it is; the idea strikes me _en
passant_.

In speaking of what is actually going on at the London theatres I
suppose the place of honor, beyond comparison, belongs to Mr. Henry
Irving. This gentleman enjoys an esteem and consideration which, I
believe, has been the lot of