ham."

"But surely it doesn't pretend to be anything else?" suggested St
Aubyn, surprised.

"Be it so. I don't like shams, I suppose," returned the boy.

"Still, you shouldn't generalise too widely," urged the other. "There
are plays where one's sensibilities are really touched, where the
situations are not forced, where the performers move and speak like
living, ordinary human beings, and, in the case of great actors, work
upon the feelings of the audience to such an extent----"

"And there the artificiality is all the greater!" chipped in Austin,
tersely. "The more perfect the illusion, the hollower the
artificiality. Of course, no one could take Sardanapalus seriously,
any more than if he were a marionette pulled by strings instead of the
sort of live marionette he really is. But where the acting and the
situations are so perfect, as you say, as to cause real emotion, the
unreality of the whole business is more flagrantly conspicuous than
ever. The emotions pourtrayed are not real, and nobody pretends they
are. The art, therefore, of making them appear real, and even
communicating them to the audience, must of necessity involve greater
artificiality than where the acting is bad and the situations
ridiculous. There's a person I know, near where I live--you never
heard of him, of course, but he's called Jock MacTavish--and he told
me he once went to see a really very great actress do some part or
other in which she had to die a most pathetic death. It was said to be
simply heart-rending, and everybody used to cry. Well, the night Jock
MacTavish was there something went wrong--a sofa was out of its place,
or a bolster had been forgotten, or a rope wouldn't work, I don't know
what it was--and the language that woman indulged in while she was in
the act of dying would have disgraced a bargee. Jock was in a
stage-box and heard every filthy word of it. Of course _he_ told me
the story as a joke, and I was rather disgusted, but I'm glad he did
so now. That was an extreme case, I know--such things don't occur one
time in ten thousand, no doubt--but it's an illustration of what I
mean when I say that the finer the illusion produced the hollower the
sham that produces it."

"You're a mighty subtle-minded young person for your age," exclaimed
St Aubyn, with a good-humoured laugh. "I confess that your theory is
new to me; it had never occurred to me before. For one who has only
been inside a theatre two or three times in hi