do, that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is
that the artist's business is not 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