ramatic and musico-dramatic forms of entertainment by some of
the critics has weakened their influence, has led the man in the street
to think that if Mr X. or Y. or Z. can find no pleasure in what he likes
that he will get no entertainment from what they admire. One supposes,
at least hopes, that dramatic critics of all kinds and grades have an
honest desire for the advance and success of British Drama. They will
hardly be successful in their wishes unless on each side a little more
tolerance is shown for the opinions professed by members of the other.

His Sympathies when Young

In some criticisms on certain demi-semi-private performances given in
London by a well-known French actress and her company there seemed to be
a note not often discoverable in English articles dealing with the
theatre. It appeared as if several of the writers had a kind of fierce
exultation in the thought that the play represented was likely to shock
a good many people--people presumably entitled to have their feelings
considered seriously. In the annals of English art there has been rather
a scanty exhibition of the desire to do what may be most easily
described by two French phrases, "_epater le bourgeois_" or "_ebouriffer
le bourgeois_."

It is, in fact, noticeable that we possess no recognised English set
phrase, such as "to startle the Philistine" or "to ruffle the hair of
the Philistine." Indeed, before Matthew Arnold imported the term
Philistine from Germany, as equivalent in art matters to the French "_le
bourgeois_" or the later expression "_l'epicier_," we really had nothing
at all to correspond with these terms. For to shock "Mrs Grundy" is
quite off the point. This is the more remarkable because the _bourgeois_
feeling--treated, by the way, admirably in Balzac's short story "Pierre
Grassou"--has long been the curse of English art, and, as represented by
the Royal Academy, still remains a paramount power for evil.

It cannot be said that the desire to "_ebouriffer le bourgeois_" often
leads to valuable results so far as the works intended to accomplish the
feat are concerned, although it is possible that some of them have
otherwise had a beneficial result. Another French phrase, "_pour activer
la digestion_," contains a hint that such an attempt may indirectly
render service to art. Our popular ideas of medical treatment have never
adopted the theory suggested by the foreign phrase, which is that when
the digestive apparatus is