an the proposition that no
one can be witty unless he condescends to be indecent. Nevertheless
there is something in it. Many real witticisms are indecent; some
profoundly immoral plays are brilliant, and it is doubtful whether the
authors of them would have been as successful if forbidden to be
indecent or immoral.

Let us contrast fairly the positions of the French and the English
dramatist. The former has at his disposal all the material for drama
available to the latter, except perhaps a limited particular branch of
local humour, whilst the Englishman not only would be unwise to employ
the foreign local humour, but is forbidden to use a very large number of
subjects and ideas open to his competitor. In other words, the
Englishman's stock may be regarded as _x_, and the Frenchman's as _x_ +
_y_, for the local humour on one side may be set off against the local
humour on the other.

Now _y_, far from being unimportant, is the chief material employed by
many of the Parisian playwrights. They and their audiences have grown
tired of _x_, whilst our unhappy writers are almost bound to confine
themselves to this far from unknown quantity. Thackeray is said to have
regretted that he did not enjoy the freedom of a Fielding. Which of our
playwrights does not envy the licence of a Capus? Think of our poor
British dramatist compelled to write for a public that likes anecdotal
plays, demands happy-ever-after endings and is easily shocked. Really
his position is pitiful. The peculiar laws of the theatre require such
brutal directness of method that although our novelists are able, by
means of delicate treatment, to handle almost any subject, the
playwright is condemned to something like a gin-horse revolution, round
a little track of conventional morality.

It is a rather curious fact that two different schools of French
dramatists approach the forbidden half-world from opposite poles--but
they get there. Emile Augier and Dumas _fils_ were sincere moralists
according to their points of view, though the methods of their
moralizing some times seem quaint to us. Both of them preached the
importance of chastity and the beauty of conjugal love and parental and
filial affection, and each admired fervently the idea of family--an idea
deemed comparatively unimportant in our colonizing country.

On the whole their ideals are ours, though sometimes there seems to us a
queer twist in their expression of them. In order to support their i