were both artificial and immoral, and filled with living
characters, who speak the thought of to-day, with the wit and culture
that are current to-day. I've seen private theatricals, where all
the performers were persons of cultivation, that....

OUR NEXT DOOR. So have I. For something particularly cheerful,
commend me to amateur theatricals. I have passed some melancholy
hours at them.

MANDEVILLE. That's because the performers acted the worn stage
plays, and attempted to do them in the manner they had seen on the
stage. It is not always so.

THE FIRE-TENDER. I suppose Mandeville would say that acting has got
into a mannerism which is well described as stagey, and is supposed
to be natural to the stage; just as half the modern poets write in a
recognized form of literary manufacture, without the least impulse
from within, and not with the purpose of saying anything, but of
turning out a piece of literary work. That's the reason we
have so much poetry that impresses one like sets of faultless
cabinet-furniture made by machinery.

THE PARSON. But you need n't talk of nature or naturalness in acting
or in anything. I tell you nature is poor stuff. It can't go alone.
Amateur acting--they get it up at church sociables nowadays--is apt
to be as near nature as a school-boy's declamation. Acting is the
Devil's art.

THE MISTRESS. Do you object to such innocent amusement?

MANDEVILLE. What the Parson objects to is, that he isn't amused.

THE PARSON. What's the use of objecting? It's the fashion of the
day to amuse people into the kingdom of heaven.

HERBERT. The Parson has got us off the track. My notion about the
stage is, that it keeps along pretty evenly with the rest of the
world; the stage is usually quite up to the level of the audience.
Assumed dress on the stage, since you were speaking of that, makes
people no more constrained and self-conscious than it does off the
stage.

THE MISTRESS. What sarcasm is coming now?

HERBERT. Well, you may laugh, but the world has n't got used to good
clothes yet. The majority do not wear them with ease. People who
only put on their best on rare and stated occasions step into an
artificial feeling.

OUR NEXT DOOR. I wonder if that's the reason the Parson finds it so
difficult to get hold of his congregation.

HERBERT. I don't know how else to account for the formality and
vapidity of a set "party," where all the guests are clothed in a
manner to which they are unaccust