his congregation: "It took place so long ago that perhaps
it never took place at all." But on the stage, when Salvini puts his
terrible, suffused face out of Desdemona's curtains, it is not the past,
but the present; there is no lurking hope that it may not be true. And I
do not happen to wish to see such realities as that. Moreover, there are
persons--my Irish friend and I, for instance--who feel abashed at what
affects us as eavesdropping on our part. It is quite right we should be
there to listen to some splendid piece of poetry, Romeo's duet with
Juliet, the moonlight quartet of Lorenzo, Jessica, Olivia, and Nerissa,
and parts of _Winter's Tale_; things which in musical quality transcend
all music. But is it right that we be present at the unpacking of our
neighbour's most private moral properties; at the dreadful laying bare
of other folk's sores and nakedness? I wonder sometimes that any of the
audience can look at the stage in company with the rest; the natural
man, one would expect, would have the lights of the pit extinguished,
and, if he needs must pry, pry at least unobserved.

There is, however, an exception: when modern drama, instead of merely
smuggling us, as by an ignominious King Candaules' ring called a theatre
ticket, to witness what we shouldn't, gives us the spectacle of
delightful personality, of individual power of soul, in its more
intimate and perfect strength. I feel this sometimes in the case of Mme.
Duse; and principally in her "Magda." This is good to see; as it is good
to see naked muscles, to watch the efforts, the triumphant grace and
strength of an athlete. For in this play of _Magda_ the Duse rivets
interests, delights not by what she does, but by what she is. The plot,
the turn of the action, is of no consequence; it might be all reversed,
and most of it omitted. We care not what a creature like this happens to
be doing or suffering; we care for her existence because it means energy
and charm. Why not deliberately aim at such effects? Now that the stage
is no longer the mere concert-room for magnificent poetry, lyric or
epic, it might become what would be consonant with our modern
psychologic tastes, the place where the genius of author or actor
allowed us to come in sight, with the fulness and completeness of the
intentional and artificial, of those finest spectacles of all, _great
temperaments_. Not merely guess at them, see them by casual glimpses, as
in real life; nor reconstruct th