ren and with uneducated persons: their
imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical
necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same
time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready
to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling,
much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has
given even the least creative of us lazy, grown-up folk a power, almost
a habit, of imaginative creation; and but a very little, though a
genial, pressure will make it act. But children and the people require
stronger stimulus, and require also a field for their imagination to
work upon. I can remember the amazing effect, entirely at variance with
the intention, which portions of _Don Quixote_--seen at a circus, of all
places--made on my mind when I was eight: it did not _realize_ ideas of
chivalry which I had, but, on the contrary, it gave me, from outside,
data (such data!) about chivalry on which my thoughts wove ideas the
most amazing for many months. Something of the kind, I think, is
happening to that Paris audience, rows and rows of eager heads and
seeing eyes, which M. Carriere has painted, just enough visible, in his
usual luminous haze, to give the mood. The stage is not shown: it really
is in those eyes and faces. It is telling them that there are worlds
different from their own; it is opening out perspectives (longer and
deeper than those of wood and cardboard) down which those cabined
thoughts and feelings may henceforth wander. The picture, like M.
Carriere's "Morning" in the Luxembourg, is one of the greatest of poetic
pictures; and it makes me, at least, understand what the value of the
stage must be to hundreds and thousands of people; to _the people_, to
children, and to those practical natures which, however learned and
cultured, seem unable to get imaginative, emotional pleasure without a
good deal of help from outward mechanism.

These are all negative reasons why I dislike the play. But there are
positive ones also. There is a story told by Lamb--or is it Hazlitt?--of
a dear man who could not bear to read _Othello_, because of the dreadful
fate of the Moor and his bride; "Such a noble gentleman! Such a sweet
lady!" he would repeat, deeply distressed. The man was not
artistic-souled; but I am like him. I know the healing anodyne in
narrative, the classic consolation which that kind priest mentioned by
Renan offered