oing to see
something which pretends to be something else, and going to see
something which admits itself to be its painful self. On the one hand,
we have Smith posing as the Prince of Denmark; on the other the fat
woman, whose unpleasant mass of unhealthy flesh is real--the lady giant
hovers between reality and fiction. On the one side art, on the other
artless entertainment; but, after all, it is difficult to say that this
wall is very solid, since sometimes the artless department is abominably
artful, and sometimes, as in the famous story of the mimic with a live
pig in a poke, the real is an impostor.

The interest in the matter lies mainly with the audience, with the human
beings greedy for pleasure and entertainment, with the traveller who,
after a happy evening at the Comedie Francaise, endeavours to get taken
to the abattoirs of Paris, or risks his life in a visit to the outer
Boulevards in order to visit some pestilential Cafe de la Mort where he
will see crude horrors contrived by looking-glasses, drink bad beer out
of _papier-mache_ skulls, and receive, in change for his money, base or
demonetised coin from waiters dressed as undertakers. And, again, our
traveller, after getting a headache at the Louvre and vainly trying to
find the Mediaeval improprieties at the Maison Cluny, will refresh
himself by a visit to the Morgue, to say nothing of Le Musee Grevin.

Why, then, do we go to the theatre? Why does the theatre exist? Why do
the enthusiasts rage and profess that it ought to be endowed? Well, upon
reflection, one sees that there are two bodies of playgoers, both, no
doubt, in search of pleasure: and, speaking very broadly, the one is the
little group whose curiosity concerning life is almost entirely
intellectual, and the other is the vast body of sensation-hunters, to
whom the latest showy play, the newest musical comedy, the divorce case
of the moment, the freak in vogue, are the means of real excitement--an
excitement which they want to obtain with the minimum expenditure of
time, trouble or thought.

A remarkable thing to the observer is the hostility of the
sensation-monger to intellectual amusement. If a play has a gloomy
ending it is promptly denounced as painful by the people who welcome an
entertainment consisting of biograph pictures representing some awful
catastrophe, and by persons who revel in a good series of animated
photographs of somebody being guillotined, or tortured in a Russian
gaol