actors at all, for
it's even easier to our poor humanity to be ineffectively stupid and
vulgar than to bring down the house."

"It's not easy, by what I can see, to produce, completely, any artistic
effect," Sherringham declared; "and those the actor produces are among
the most momentous we know. You'll not persuade me that to watch such an
actress as Madame Carre wasn't an education of the taste, an enlargement
of one's knowledge."

"She did what she could, poor woman, but in what belittling, coarsening
conditions! She had to interpret a character in a play, and a character
in a play--not to say the whole piece: I speak more particularly of
modern pieces--is such a wretchedly small peg to hang anything on! The
dramatist shows us so little, is so hampered by his audience, is
restricted to so poor an analysis."

"I know the complaint. It's all the fashion now. The _raffines_ despise
the theatre," said Peter Sherringham in the manner of a man abreast with
the culture of his age and not to be captured by a surprise. "_Connu,
connu_!"

"It will be known better yet, won't it? when the essentially brutal
nature of the modern audience is still more perceived, when it has been
properly analysed: the _omnium gatherum_ of the population of a big
commercial city at the hour of the day when their taste is at its
lowest, flocking out of hideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with
food, stultified with buying and selling and with all the other sordid
preoccupations of the age, squeezed together in a sweltering mass,
disappointed in their seats, timing the author, timing the actor,
wishing to get their money back on the spot--all before eleven o'clock.
Fancy putting the exquisite before such a tribunal as that! There's not
even a question of it. The dramatist wouldn't if he could, and in nine
cases out of ten he couldn't if he would. He has to make the basest
concessions. One of his principal canons is that he must enable his
spectators to catch the suburban trains, which stop at 11.30. What would
you think of any other artist--the painter or the novelist--whose
governing forces should be the dinner and the suburban trains? The old
dramatists didn't defer to them--not so much at least--and that's why
they're less and less actable. If they're touched--the large loose
men--it's only to be mutilated and trivialised. Besides, they had a
simpler civilisation to represent--societies in which the life of man
was in action, in passion, i