that of the policeman; and that such factitious
consequences and put-up jobs as divorces and executions and the
detective operations that lead up to them are no essential part of
life, though, like poisons and buttered slides and red-hot pokers, they
provide material for plenty of thrilling or amusing stories suited to
people who are incapable of any interest in psychology. But the fine
artists must keep the policeman out of his studies of sex and studies
of crime. It is by clinging nervously to the policeman that most of the
pseudo sex plays convince me that the writers have either never had any
serious personal experience of their ostensible subject, or else have
never conceived it possible that the stage door present the phenomena
of sex as they appear in nature.

THE LIMITS OF STAGE PRESENTATION.

But the stage presents much more shocking phenomena than those of sex.
There is, of course, a sense in which you cannot present sex on the
stage, just as you cannot present murder. Macbeth must no more really
kill Duncan than he must himself be really slain by Macduff. But the
feelings of a murderer can be expressed in a certain artistic
convention; and a carefully prearranged sword exercise can be gone
through with sufficient pretence of earnestness to be accepted by the
willing imaginations of the younger spectators as a desperate combat.

The tragedy of love has been presented on the stage in the same way. In
Tristan and Isolde, the curtain does not, as in Romeo and Juliet, rise
with the lark: the whole night of love is played before the spectators.
The lovers do not discuss marriage in an elegantly sentimental way:
they utter the visions and feelings that come to lovers at the supreme
moments of their love, totally forgetting that there are such things in
the world as husbands and lawyers and duelling codes and theories of
sin and notions of propriety and all the other irrelevancies which
provide hackneyed and bloodless material for our so-called plays of
passion.

PRUDERIES OF THE FRENCH STAGE.

To all stage presentations there are limits. If Macduff were to stab
Macbeth, the spectacle would be intolerable; and even the pretence
which we allow on our stage is ridiculously destructive to the illusion
of the scene. Yet pugilists and gladiators will actually fight and kill
in public without sham, even as a spectacle for money. But no sober
couple of lovers of any delicacy could endure to be watched. We in
Engla