ar dramas of the _Zaza_ and _Sapho_ type we were
invited to grieve over the disappointments in lawless love of women
quite shameless in character.

For years past a large proportion of plays have concerned themselves
with the question of the seventh commandment; and whilst, as a rule, in
order to dodge the Censor, it is pretended that no actual breach has
occurred, the audience know that this is merely a pretence. In a large
number of these plays the question of adultery is handled so facetiously
as to tend to cause people to regard it as a trivial matter; whilst in
numbers of the others, where the matter is handled more seriously, the
actual consequences of sin are of such little inconvenience to the
sinners that, although theoretically the plays preach a moral, the
actual lesson is of no weight at all.

A curious aspect of the matter is that theatredom, as appears from the
bulk of the evidence before the Censorship Commission, is opposed to the
class of play in which the proposition is preached that "the wages of
sin is death." Plays like _Ghosts_ and _A Doll's House_--as far as the
episode of Nora's hopeless lover is concerned--and the works of that
fierce moralist M. Brieux are banned by most of official theatredom, and
some of them are censored. In fact, the whole note of the theatre is
that gloomy or painful matters should be excluded. It is not too much to
say that the theatre insists strongly upon being regarded simply as a
place of entertainment, and objects almost savagely to dramas which
really show sin as ugly and vice as harmful, both to the vicious and
innocent; it refuses to be a moralizing institution, and those who seek
to justify such an attitude do so by claiming that it is a branch of art
and not morals.

No doubt there are exceptions. We have had _Everyman_ upon the stage,
and _The Passing of the Third Floor Back_, in which the highest morality
is preached, and in _The Fires of Fate_ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a
sincere effort to use the stage for noble purposes; nor would it be
difficult to multiply instances. Moreover, it may be claimed that the
dramas of Shakespeare, on the whole, have a high standard of morality
which might satisfy the Church, and they play a considerable part on our
modern stage; yet, speaking with a really substantial knowledge of the
subject, one may say confidently that, despite much that is good and
admirable, the balance is seriously to the bad. Our theatre does a
litt