bler still to shoot directly at it.
Surely there lies a simple truth beneath this paradox of words:--it is a
higher aim to aim straight than to aim too high.

If a play be so constituted as to please its consciously selected auditors,
neither grieving their judgment by striking lower than their level of
appreciation, nor leaving them unsatisfied by snobbishly feeding them
caviare when they have asked for bread, it must be judged a good play for
its purpose. The one thing needful is that it shall neither insult their
intelligence nor trifle with their taste. In view of the many different
theatre-going publics and their various demands, the critic, in order to be
just, must be endowed with a sympathetic versatility of approbation. He
should take as his motto those judicious sentences with which the Autocrat
of the Breakfast-Table prefaced his remarks upon the seashore and the
mountains:--"No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your
place is is the best for you."

V

IMITATION AND SUGGESTION IN THE DRAMA

There is an old saying that it takes two to make a bargain or a quarrel;
and, similarly, it takes two groups of people to make a play,--those whose
minds are active behind the footlights, and those whose minds are active in
the auditorium. We go to the theatre to enjoy ourselves, rather than to
enjoy the actors or the author; and though we may be deluded into thinking
that we are interested mainly by the ideas of the dramatist or the imagined
emotions of the people on the stage, we really derive our chief enjoyment
from such ideas and emotions of our own as are called into being by the
observance of the mimic strife behind the footlights. The only thing in
life that is really enjoyable is what takes place within ourselves; it is
our own experience, of thought or of emotion, that constitutes for us the
only fixed and memorable reality amid the shifting shadows of the years;
and the experience of anybody else, either actual or imaginary, touches us
as true and permanent only when it calls forth an answering imagination of
our own. Each of us, in going to the theatre, carries with him, in his own
mind, the real stage on which the two hours' traffic is to be enacted; and
what passes behind the footlights is efficient only in so far as it calls
into activity that immanent potential clash of feelings and ideas within
our brain. It is the proof of a bad play that it permits us to regard it
with no aw