sluggish it is advisable to eat something
violently indigestible so that the stomach, summoning all its forces to
deal with the intruder, may be aroused to a state of activity. This is a
kind of theory to be tried on the dog--not your own dog, of course.

Yet it may be that an occasional slap in the face of the public in
respect of artistic matters awakens it from the complacent state of
lethargy in which it lies with regard to most questions of art.

The young English dramatist has very few opportunities of making the
hair of the Philistine stand on end or activating his digestion; he is
worse off than the youthful British painter who, as those that have
haunted the English studios and the ateliers on the Surrey side of the
Seine well know, can give a kind of birth to his insults to the taste of
the churchwarden. Once down upon canvas a picture is at least
half-alive, whilst nothing is more pitifully dead than the audacious
play in manuscript.

The Theatre de l'Oeuvre gave to French revolutionaries in dramatic art
the chance of setting the Seine on fire, but the Censor has allowed our
playwrights little scope. The evasion of his authority by means of
nominally private performances has brought into brief life on the boards
very few pieces in my time in which one can really see evidence of the
youthful desire to shock the Philistine. In _Ghosts_, _Les Trois Filles
de M. Dupont_, and _Monna Vanna_, though all three were prohibited by
the authority, there is no sign of the particular element in question.
The first two are serious, sober studies of social problems, not
intended to shock or startle but to educate the orthodox. The
prohibition of the third was simply an official blunder in relation to a
dignified work of art.

On the other hand there is a trace of the spirit in _Mrs Warren's
Profession_, and _Salome_ seems full of it. Curiously enough, in some of
the permitted dramas by Mr Bernard Shaw there is evidence of this
desire. Mr Shaw often seems to be saying, "I'm going to make your flesh
creep." He is a brilliant dramatist, and also, desperately in earnest,
and it may well be that they are right who think that his plays will
live along after the death of most English works produced since the
public and critics were bewildered at the first performance of
_Widowers' Houses_, and he certainly appears to adopt as a policy the
theory of stirring up into activity the lethargic stomach of the British
playgoer by devi