rn nothing else by our labour we
certainly get to know what kind of play and performance is to the taste
of other people.

Sometimes one asks oneself what truth there is in the jaded critic
theory. It cannot be pretended that a man who goes to the theatre three
times or so a week pays each visit in the hopeful state of mind or with
the expectation of intense enjoyment possible to those who only
patronize the playhouse now and then and pick their pieces. Indeed, he
very often sets out with the knowledge that he is going to pass a dull
evening. If he is unable to guess that, his experience will have told
him little and his capacity is small. Moreover, he cannot be expected to
take such pleasure in the average play as if his visits were rare, and
what has been said about the play necessarily applies to the acting.

Sometimes when watching a work of common quality, a painful idea comes
into one's mind, and we wonder how people, compelled to see it night
after night perhaps for half-a-year, can endure the strain. What, for
instance, must be the sufferings of the conductor or of a member of the
orchestra at a successful second-rate musical comedy; of a stage manager
compelled for months, one after another, to direct a brainless farce? Of
course the people lumped together in the technical term as "the front of
the house" have a remedy, and after the first night or two only appear
in the auditorium when the curtain is down, or, to be more accurate,
just before it descends, when all hands are expected to be on deck.

There are critics that resemble the person who denied that any beer
could be bad, and would sooner pass an evening in a theatre watching a
mediocre play acted in a style no better than it deserves than at home
in a well-stocked library. They resemble the journalist in a story by
Balzac who, when blind, haunted a newspaper office and revelled in the
smell of printers' ink, and they have been known for their own pleasure
to pay a second visit to a piece on which they wrote a condemnatory
criticism. In fact, they have the curious mania for the theatre which
induces many people with no talent for acting to abandon comfortable
careers and starve on the stage--or at the stage door.

That the critic's sufferings in the playhouse are considerable is
incontestable, and they are keener at the performance of works of
mediocrity than when watching very bad plays. Fortunately there are two
sides to every hedge. When the play