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 England, accustomed to
consider the French stage much more licentious than the British,
are always surprised and puzzled when we learn, as we may do any
day if we come within reach of such information, that French
actors are often scandalized by what they consider the indecency
of the English stage, and that French actresses who desire a
greater license in appealing to the sexual instincts than the
French stage allows them, learn and establish themselves on the
English stage. The German and Russian stages are in the same
relation to the French and perhaps more or less all the Latin
stages. The reason is that, partly from a want of respect for the