to define, on which our imaginations live. We
should not go to the theatre as we go to a
chemist's, or a dram-shop, but as we go to
a dinner, where the food we need is taken
with pleasure and excitement. This was
nearly always so in Spain and England and
France when the drama was at its richest --
the infancy and decay of the drama tend to
be didactic -- but in these days the playhouse
is too often stocked with the drugs of many


VI

seedy problems, or with the absinthe or ver-
mouth of the last musical comedy.
The drama, like the symphony, does not
teach or prove anything. Analysts with their
problems, and teachers with their systems, are
soon as old-fashioned as the pharmacopœia of
Galen, -- look at Ibsen and the Germans -- but
the best plays of Ben Jonson and Molière can
no more go out of fashion than the black-
berries on the hedges.
Of the things which nourish the imagination
humour is one of the most needful, and it is
dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire
calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic
element in man; and where a country loses
its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing,