or. Naturally they think that a true mirror can
teach them nothing. Only by giving them back some monstrous image can
the mirror amuse them or terrify them. It is not until they grow up to
the point at which they learn that they know very little about
themselves, and that they do not see themselves in a true mirror as
other people see them, that they become consumed with curiosity as to
what they really are like, and begin to demand that the stage shall be
a mirror of such accuracy and intensity of illumination that they shall
be able to get glimpses of their real selves in it, and also learn a
little how they appear to other people.

For audiences of this highly developed class, sex can no longer be
ignored or conventionalized or distorted by the playwright who makes
the mirror. The old sentimental extravagances and the old grossnesses
are of no further use to him. Don Giovanni and Zerlina are not gross:
Tristan and Isolde are not extravagant or sentimental. They say and do
nothing that you cannot bear to hear and see; and yet they give you,
the one pair briefly and slightly, and the other fully and deeply, what
passes in the minds of lovers. The love depicted may be that of a
philosophic adventurer tempting an ignorant country girl, or of a
tragically serious poet entangled with a woman of noble capacity in a
passion which has become for them the reality of the whole universe. No
matter: the thing is dramatized and dramatized directly, not talked
about as something that happened before the curtain rose, or that will
happen after it falls.

FARCICAL COMEDY SHIRKING ITS SUBJECT.

Now if all this can be done in the key of tragedy and philosophic
comedy, it can, I have always contended, be done in the key of farcical
comedy; and Overruled is a trifling experiment in that manner.
Conventional farcical comedies are always finally tedious because the
heart of them, the inevitable conjugal infidelity, is always evaded.
Even its consequences are evaded. Mr. Granville Barker has pointed out
rightly that if the third acts of our farcical comedies dared to
describe the consequences that would follow from the first and second
in real life, they would end as squalid tragedies; and in my opinion
they would be greatly improved thereby even as entertainments; for I
have never seen a three-act farcical comedy without being bored and
tired by the third act, and observing that the rest of the audience
were in the same condition, tho