idity about accomplishing before other
people a natural function which in other aspects of life is certainly
carried too far by us.

We have an extraordinary amount of eating nowadays upon the stage,
managed very badly. In the old days, when people got through a banquet,
consisting chiefly of a special brand of cardboard chicken, a real
_diner a la carte_ at the present time only used in pantomime, washed
down by copious draughts of nothing from gilded _papier-mache_ goblets
which refuse to make the chink of metal, and spent no more than five
minutes over the whole affair, it was recognized that the banquet was a
mere convention; nobody pretended to believe in any aspect of it, and
therefore no one questioned its verisimilitude.

In the twentieth century real food is consumed, the diet being chiefly
vegetarian, and damp decoctions are drunk with gusto. Occasionally, it
is said, Persian sherbet, or lemon kali, once joys of our youth, give a
theatrical fizziness to toast and water in bottles with deceitful lordly
labels. Unfortunately, except in _The Man from Blankley's_, these real
things are consumed as fast as a midday meal at an American
boarding-house, with the result that they are a mixture of realism and
convention profoundly unconvincing. Art would be better served by the
old-fashioned method, for the playgoer is more willing to concede a
whole than a half "make-belief."

One amusing result of the fact that we have so many adaptations from the
French is that not only are the names abominably mispronounced--which
can hardly be avoided--but that the efforts at representing the foreign
feeding as a rule are all wrong. Simili-champagne is consumed where no
Frenchman would dream of drinking "fizz," for across the Channel the
detestable snobbishness of the English in relation to champagne is
imitated chiefly by the modern plutocracy and by the prosperous members
of what is alleged to be the most ancient, if hardly the most
honourable, of professions. When we see a French company in a play, the
leading lady solemnly wipes the inside of her glass with her napkin,
occasionally goes a little further and breathes into it--breathes rather
dampishly. In the subsequent English version the leading actress is far
too much of a lady to do anything of the kind. The foreigners cut up
everything on their plates, clean their knives upon the bread, sometimes
before and sometimes afterwards scooping out the salt with them, and
then l